Y.llYUOT. 



ATION 



EDWARD S. WILSON 






"""■- 
"'.:•■■■' 



I 



m. 



msfm. 



m 



■■'■•' 



MX 



'--■■'■'■ 



,; --. ■' 



Wsmswa 

.<.■■■ 







ft / jf 

Class i 

1/\/a 
Book _ : 



PRESENTED BY 



Keynotes of Education 



BEING A COLLECTION 

OF ADDRESSES ON THE MORAL PHASES OF 

THE SUBJECT 



BY 

EDWARD S. WILSON 

Editor of the Ironton (Ohio) Register, author of "An 
Oriental Outing" 






CINCINNATI 

CURTS & JENNINGS 

1898 






V30> 

pec s me 



PREFACE 



'"THIS book contains addresses I have made at va- 
rious places during the past few years. They are 
all educational in their character, and are intended 
to give some emphasis to the ethical side of life. I 
have thought that too much stress can not be made 
in impressing moral sentiment upon education, busi- 
ness, society, and individual experience, and upon 
that idea I have ventured to print these pages. They 
are written mainly in a style to meet the requirements 
of a platform effort ; and yet, I hope that whatever 
lack of gentle continuity may appear in them will not 
detract from the force of the truths which I have en- 
deavored to express. My purpose is to aid in under- 
mining the despotism of the material, and in advanc- 
ing the sway of the ideal and moral. I know in what 
narrow limits my little effort is confined, and yet I 
trust I will be justified in doing the best I can in a 
field that is calling for stronger workers. I may say, 
also, aside from my real intention in publishing these 
pages, I am not unmindful of the kind opinion of 
many who heard the addresses, expressed in urgent 

requests that I make a book of them. 

3 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/keynotesofeducatOOwils 



CONTENTS 



PAGE. 

Moral Aspects of Education", 7 

(Harcourt Place Commencement, Gambier, 0.) 

Tendencies, 28 

(High School Commencement, Nelsonville, O.) 

POETEY OF THE SKIES, 53 

(Opening of McMillin Observatory, Columbus, 0.) 

Culture on the Farm, 64 

(Farmers' Institute, Haverhill, 0.) 

The Art of Life, 75 

(S. E. Ohio Teachers' Association, Marietta, 0.) 

Higher Aims of Journalism, 99 

(Ohio Editorial Association, Columbus, O.) 

5 



6 Contents. 



PAGE. 

Pateiotism, Ill 

(Ohio Conference Gamp-meeting, Lancaster, 0.) 

Peesonal Foece of the Teachee, . . . 133 
(Teachers' Institute, Ironton, O.) 

Examinations, 149 

(Ohio State Teachers' Association, Chautauqua.) 



Keynotes of Education. 



I 



MORAL ASPECTS OF EDUCATION. 

MAKE my appeal, this afternoon, in behalf of 
higher ideals in Education. There are sentiment 
and desire enough if they were only rightly directed. 
We are education worshipers, "but bow at the wrong 
shrine. We enter the cathedral; we admire the grace- 
ful columns, the hues of the pictured windows, and 
the tremulous roll of the organ, but ignore the grand 
fact of all— the presence of God. Notwithstanding 
our hearty protest, materialism is enthroned in the 
educational field, and the duty of the day is to chal- 
lenge the authority of that splendid sovereign. 

Every philosophy that is worth the name means, 
in its final analysis, faith in God. Every science sees 
beyond the atom a force before which the micro- 
scope, the acid, the electric current recoil. Every 
fact has its moral supremacy. Knowledge is power; 
but the sort of power depends upon the kind of 
knowledge. Hence the importance of the standpoint, 
and the necessity of recognizing quality as well as 
quantity. This little orb, with its beautiful compan- 
ions, swings around the celestial throne; but the fall 
of a leaf is akin to it, and the thought of the heart 
alongside of that. 

Infinity itself is not so great that it can disdain 

7 



8 Keynotes of Education. 

the idlest fancy. We are so accustomed to listen to 
God's voice in the thunders of Sinai that we forget 
that the very interstices of the sunbeams are filled 
with his authority and love. We take this world as a 
great practical fact, into which God comes now and 
then, only to discipline and punish, and fail to see 
that every atom dances before him, and the very 
vacuums of space are loaded with his presence. 

My claim is, that Education must recognize the 
fact that this world is God's; that everything we study 
must be in the light of this great truth; that our 
mathematics and chemistry are as close to him as our 
political economy and our moral philosophy. There 
is no chasm between the infinite and the things about 
us. The bluebird's song chords with the angel'spiarp, 
over in heaven. We go about as if a little terres- 
trial morality borders our commonplace, and ravels 
out into soft hues and delicate fringes, and there 
ends. We make two worlds where there is one, and 
we place God over in the other, when he is wholly in 
ours. 

We think we can think a thought, say a word, or 
do a deed apart from and unrelated to eternity, and 
do not realize that each thought, word, or deed is 
taken up by God's great law of truth and justice, as 
the law of gravitation embraces the fluttering snow- 
flake or the dead sparrow, to carry everywhere and 
always the logic of its life. 

We look upon the Beatitudes as metaphors of ex- 
treme delicacy, or as tests of ultimate being, and yet 
they measure the axioms that we work our problems 
with; the principles of affinity that determine every 



Moral Aspects of Education. 9 

chemical reaction in our laboratory; the laws of phys- 
ics whereby every star paints a rainbow on the canvas, 
and the soft rhythm of the poem that steals into the 
soul to kindle an inspiration or support a purpose. 
It is all divine. 

I have seen somewhere the difficult definition of 
ralue explained by a diagram, where the straight 
lines and direction impressed the truth stronger than 
language could. Several of the psychologies, and 
notably Herbart's, are developed by algebraical for- 
mulae — an equation the last resort for an expression of 
the power of the soul. The parables in the New Tes- 
tament are just as moral in their own form and sub- 
stance as in their application, and there is just as 
much of physical law, moral precept, and earthly 
duty taught in them as there is of heavenly hope. 

Take an axiom, a law of physics, a moral principle, 
and Christ's footsteps, and put them together, and 
they make one straight line. We must recognize this 
identity and relation in our educational systems. We 
can not split up truth into splinters. We can not 
proclaim that God reigns and Chance reigns also. 
Let us, then, as pupil and teacher, start out with this 
purpose pervading every fiber and nerve of our being, 
that, whatever else happens, we will hang our thought 
to God's thought, and make his truth our own. 

These are not misty phrases. They describe the 
ground occupied by advanced thinkers upon the sub- 
ject of education to-day. It is not so much a question 
of acquisition as it is of disposition. More important 
than what we have, is what we are doing with it; and 
that is determined by the value of the possession. 



10 Keynotes of Education. 



Empty facts, empty lives; low knowledge, mean 
power. 

We get to the level of what we know, just as water 
seeks its own. The true value of a fact lies in the 
meaning God puts upon it. That abides; that is 
eternal. His thought is the altitude of education. 
In point of skill, regarding the mere concrete import 
of the act, baiting a hook and translating a line of 
Virgil occupy the same plane. But the outlook, the 
opportunity, the possibilities, are different. In the 
classics, one feels the sweet spirit of things that 
dwells amid infinite truth, and it sweeps through 
one's soul like the breath from a bank of flowers. 

Over on the other side of the line, beyond the syn- 
tax and the scanning, lie the infinite depths of feel- 
ing, where the angels of the intellect fly — the hopes, 
the loves, the fancies, the amenities, and the impulses 
that dare and do. The biographer of Calhoun says: 
"Calhoun led thought rather than men, and, lacking 
imagination, he led thought badly." 

Truth is not bounded by the concrete; it is not the 
expression of a cold syllogism, but the impulse, the 
yearning, the faith alongside, which our souls must 
grapple, or we lose it all. Materialism does not meet 
even half way the immortal spirit of love and duty. 

What is culture? The fluttering leaf, the sailing 
shadow, the dreaming landscape, the songs of the 
stars, the modesty of the lily, the strength of the 
hills, and all God's thought expressed in forms of 
grace and beauty; and these, with all their lessons of 
power, of wisdom, of mercy, of justice, of love, trans- 
lated into human thought, and hope, and conduct, 
and desire, constitute culture. And how do we attain 



Moral Aspects of Education. 11 



it? By digging deep into our mathematics, by toiling 
long at our Latin composition, by working patiently 
in the laboratory, by constant mingling with the 
great men in the library, and all the time keeping the 
heart wide open to the divine influences that crowd 
about, and leaning out the soul, as Gerald Massey 
expresses it, to catch the song of every angel that 
flutters around. 

Study is to give us power, discernment, insight to 
know the truth, the reality, the divine quality of the 
thing we see or hear— not to load us down, but to lift 
us up — and whenever we suspect that the processes 
are winning our devotion, that we are studying the 
Latin for the Latin, or the geometry for the geom- 
etry, then we may be sure that we are drifting away 
from the shore of eternal truth. 

Did you ever, in reading a line of Horace or 
Homer, feel a kind word steal into your heart, or hear 
a trumpet-note of duty, or see a flower-fringed stream 
twining amid the woodlands, on whose banks you 
wove your fancies into purpose ? Did you ever strug- 
gle with a problem, like climbing a steep hill, strain- 
ing, pulling, almost despairing, a cruel wall before, a 
mean, dark world about you, till finally the problem 
is solved, the summit is reached, when your outlook 
stretches to the eaves of heaven, and a big, beautiful 
world is born of your toil and sacrifice ? Did you ever 
look down into a microscopic cell, and see God's hand 
shuttling a molecule with the same grandeur of 
achievement that he flings a constellation through 
the infinite spaces, without feeling that your own 
little life and energy were too sacred to be wasted? 

Such ideals deck every study. "Great knowledge 



12 Keynotes of Education. 



stimulates great conjecture," says Emerson. The 
spirit accompanies true instruction. It is as necessary 
as the light to the leaf. Thus souls are built up, 
character is constructed, and society is made more 
beautiful. 

Education is in three parts— knowing, feeling, 
willing. Each is as necessary to the other as centrip- 
etal or centrifugal to the orbit. They are the knowl- 
edge, the wisdom, the understanding of the Bible. 
A trinity of fact, faith, and duty. This is God's 
psychology. Whoever bows to one of these basic 
ideas and ignores the others is false to heaven and 
earth. The wood, the water, the wind, and all things 
material, and the relation between them all, consti- 
tuting a unity of nature, bristling with a million 
tethers fastened to the Infinite, and ourself, stand- 
ing a brother creature amid them — this is the arena 
of education; and yet, surrounded by these radiant 
conditions, and equipped for the mastery of them, we 
go about picking up birdseed, and building cairns of 
pemmican for the cold day that never comes. 

0, my friends, this is not education! You remem- 
ber the story of the artist who could paint such beau- 
tiful sunsets. He had a talent for melting the sun- 
beams in the translucent air, that threw' a dreamful 
haze over the horizon, and made one feel as if the sun 
was sinking with a sigh. No other painter could do 
it. The charm seemed confined to this one. A bro- 
ther artist asked the secret of it, and he was told it 
was in the combination of the paints, and the mixture 
was disclosed. That painter tried it, but failed; the 
colors seemed to congest into specks and blotches, 



Moral Aspects of Education. 13 

and in his despair he went to the other and told him 
his perplexity, whereupon the successful painter said, 
"These blotches appear sometimes in my sunsets, too; 
but I change them into birds and set them flying." 

Does that trembling leaf tell of firewood only? 
Is that butterfly merely a glint of wings? Is the 
rainbow simply a sign that you can plow to-morrow? 
Does that gray cliff out yonder in the air, the brother 
of the firmament, tell you of building-stone? Is this 
line from Shakespeare only for parsing and analyzing 
and unraveling tangled modifiers? Does your friend 
next door come to you simply as a wearer of clothes 
and a repeater of trifles? 

Eemember that we rise no higher than we see 
things. Just as we look at them, they look at us. 
In our own minds we change the blotches into birds, 
or the birds into blotches. A famous astronomer 
told me, with some show of regret, not long ago, that 
familiarity, which tends to breed contempt unless 
watched, has brought him to regard the stars and 
planets as little more than clods and stones. Hamer- 
ton tells us, in his "Intellectual Life," of a graceful 
genius who left literature for geology, and before 
long the rich and generous style of writing, which 
made his art captivating, disappeared, and in its place 
came a stiff and dead-level style, like the strata where 
his heart had become imbedded. There is a story of a 
professor who, hearing the remark that there were 
great influence and power in woman's tears, declared 
that he could see nothing in them but a little muriate 
of soda and a solution of phosphate. 

It is an immense difference, the standpoint we 



14 Keynotes of Education. 

take. In fact, truth depends upon the standpoint. 
If as materialists, as mere physicists, we look at things, 
the world shrivels up at our feet. The commercial 
spirit transforms beauty into traffic and turns ideality 
into merchandise; and the sad part is, there seems to 
be no measure for education except this utility, which 
regards eating, drinking, dressing, and talking as the 
chief end of life. 

Thus far I have been guilty, somewhat, of the very 
common and calamitous error of fault-finding, and 
now I must endeavor to make amends; for a fault- 
finder is not a useful member of society. Progress is 
positive. We advance by going ahead. We uphold 
the reign of Truth and Justice by being just and 
truthful. The devil is always ready for a fight, and 
he has good wind. Moralizing counts for little. The 
most potent agency for good in the world is a man or 
woman who has clear and positive convictions, and 
is faithful to them. 

He need not vaunt them, or make generous ac- 
claim of them on public occasions; he may never be 
heard; but in his walk, his intercourse, his genial 
good morning, the kindly welcome at his doorstep, 
the trend of talk at his table, his quiet, generous sup- 
port of all good men and good purposes, he shows 
that through his life a principle runs that harmonizes 
all into true manhood. 

To get at these definite ideas, these controlling 
moral forces, is the first duty. A very few first prin- 
ciples occupy the field, and constitute the forefront 
of educational processes. God runs the whole uni- 
verse on laws that you may count on your fingers. 



Moral Aspects of Education. 1 5 

Every problem of human experience may be solved by 
a reference to three or four moral or physical laws. 

To know them and to obey them is the Alpha and 
Omega of education. They transcend far all matters 
of mere literary or scientific value. They reduce life 
to Doric simplicity and strength. The lack of knowl- 
edge or of recognition of these basic laws accounts for 
most of the indifferentism and selfishness in trade, 
society, education, politics, and religion. It is said 
before the Government strung its lights along the 
river, the pilots kept their craft in the channel by 
watching the crests of the hills that stood out against 
the sky. And so, we may guide our steps by keeping 
our eyes on the summits of eternal wisdom that point 
to the skies wherever we go. 

Nothing comes from nothing. Let one measure 
his idling, his waiting, his dreaming, his coveting, 
his cheating, his gambling, Ms stealing, by that 
axiom. A straight (or right) line is the shortest dis- 
tance between two points. There is your judgment 
against circumlocution, insincerity, indirection, pre- 
varication, and all forms of revolt against the frank 
and sturdy gospel of the yea and nay. Equals added 
to unequals make unequals — a principle that will 
stand when eternity grows old. You can not add har- 
mony to discord and produce harmony; you can not 
mix right with error and make right; you can not 
compromise; you can not justify the means by the 
end; you can not make your wickedness right by giv- 
ing to the preacher. Water seeks its own level; so does 
society, and politics, and thought, and religion. You 
can not think mean of your neighbor and good of 



16 Keynotes of Education. 

God; one's prayers, even, seek the level of his life and 
purpose. Action and reaction are equal, or the effect 
is the measure of the cause. Sowing and reaping, 
thinking and doing, living here and hereafter, go to- 
gether. The cause and the consequence must balance. 

These are the eternal verities on which the uni- 
verse was built. Divine justice is predicated on them; 
the starry heavens hang from them, the sunbeam 
turns the smoke back into wood; the rose blooms, the 
girl blushes, and the atom changes its gait, in obedi- 
ence to these laws. 

We may think these decrees will slacken, and in- 
justice, cruelty, falsehood, indolence, selfishness carry 
banners of triumph along the world. But never. 
These laws endure, and not a jot or tittle will pass 
away till all be fulfilled. God's greatest law handles 
the mote, and the scale that weighs the fate of the 
universe tips with the word that you speak to a 
friend, or the thought that you think in the dark. 
"We are so apt to think that this world is a great, awk- 
ward, stumbling, crotchety thing, bobbing up unex- 
pectedly, jarring around, or tumbling about on a sea 
of shallows and breakers, everything on a spree of dis- 
order and confusion. But not so. This universe is 
so delicately poised that if a mote were moved out 
of its place, the old world would reel; or if a wave of 
a ray of light were shortened a millionth of an inch, 
the constellations would be shaken to fragments, and 
chaos would usurp the throne of the Infinite. 

What we need most is an ethics that is simple and 
pure, like a mother's love; that has a breath of divin- 
ity in it, exhaled from every fact and circumstance 



Moral Aspects of Education. 17 

about us. It should go with the second reader, the 
home-life, the walk on the hills, the ride down the 
street, the writing of a letter, and the paying of a 
debt. In our universities moral philosophy is placed 
in the last year, as if it were more abstruse than the 
calculus and Greek verbs, and can only be seen from 
dizzy heights. 

Ethics is the real side of everything, from the 
cradle to immortality; it is the only study; it is what 
gives value to mathematics, to history, to science, to 
literature; and to plod through these studies without 
inquiry at every step what relation this instruction 
puts us into with the great, throbbing world about us, 
or God's purpose with reference to us, is trifling with 
education. 

How do these things affect one's sensibility? Do 
they increase one's faith, heighten one's aspirations, 
strengthen one's courage, broaden one's sympathies, 
extend one's amenities, and enlarge one's self-denial? 
Or is it, after all, only the surface reflection, the 
shine, the shimmer, to make one appear and dis- 
appear? 

It is the old story. There is a serpent lurking in 
the tree of knowledge. Shall we listen to it, and not 
hear God's warning? Aye, we are doing it more than 
we think. The idolatry of the material is so plain; 
it captures the senses so easily, that, ere we are aware, 
we are all turned pagans to sound, sight, and taste. 
The dust covers all. 

To restate the ideas more compactly, and perhaps 
less vaguely, Life is an art. Art is an expression of 
the soul. To make it true, the soul must be true. 
2 



18 Keynotes of Education. 



This means in imitation of God. And this comes by 
being near to God, by watching him, by thinking his 
thoughts, and knowing his wishes— following him 
from the springing of a blade of grass to the blooming 
of the Beatitudes, from the crawling of a snail to the 
sad cry on Calvary. 

This is not preaching. It is not a Sunday affair. 
I talk from a drygoods box. I am sitting in your 
office and speak these words. Learning of God in the 
million ways he comes to us every hour, from clover 
and cloud and Calvary, is the most practical and 
needful thing in the world. This is education, and 
all outside of it is a cheat and a sham. They make 
life earnest and serious, of course, but more beautiful 
and lovely because it is true. All truth is serious. 
Most of the gayety and laughter of this world comes 
from the grotesque and inconsistent; from looking at 
the fiat side of things. Let them be. But let them 
not crowd out the earnest and real. The flippant ad- 
miration of beauty is not artistic. Beauty itself is 
solemn, for it is evanescent and fading. You can see 
the Gate Beautiful from the weeds of Gethsemane. 

Every true artist paints beauty with a tinge of 
solemness. They have taken as the type of beauty 
the sad, sweet face -of the mother of the Crucified 
One. True art is ever reverent; so is every true life. 
Our conduct is our interpretation, through the spirit, 
of the fact of God's absence or presence in the world. 
The interpretation is important. That is why we 
are here to-day— to look into each other's faces and 
say to one another, "I will welcome as a message from 
on high every truth of my text-book, every fact from 
the laboratory, every word of inspiration and counsel 



Moral Aspects of Education. 19 

sent to me to build up my soul, to give it strength, 
insight, feeling, faith, purpose, that I may the better, 
by word, deed, or silence, carry the thought and love 
of the good Allfather among my fellows, and do my 
best to make the world as he would have it, remem- 
bering, as Forsythe says, "It is a gifted imagination 
that best divines for us the moral earnestness and sol- 
emn hazard of common life." 

This material age puts God so far out into the uni- 
verse that he has little concern for this planet, and 
it is our privilege to share in his nonchalance; that 
each atom is invested with a potency Avhich evolves 
its own conceit, and there it forever ends; and our 
lives go with them — a little chemistry, a little passion, 
a little work, a little longing, and up comes the wave 
of eternity and washes them all away. 

Divinity is not so hedged. It throbs and sings and 
shines and smiles from everything. This is not Pan- 
theism. The rose is not God, it is his expression of 
beauty; the rainbow is not God, it is his expression of 
grace; the tornado is not God, it is his expression of 
force; the deep, starlit blue is not God, it is his ex- 
pression of infinitude. These are the lessons to learn, 
not the science merely, but the spirit, which is greater 
than the science. 

Here is where materialism stops — with the knowl- 
edge. Here is where education stands. But here is 
where duty and character begin — in the divine mean- 
ing of things, in the sweet and simple truth of things. 
We have been so badgered about the Bible in the 
schools that they have succeeded almost in driving 
out God himself, and all his beautiful angels, too. 

I care not how practical this age may be. Let the 



20 Keynotes of Education. 

steam puff, the wheels whirr, and the dust fly; let the 
great factories dot the land, the railroads streak the 
continent, and the marts he filled with traffic; pile up 
splendid architecture, huild heautiful homes, crowd 
the libraries with hooks, cover the walls with pic- 
tures, fill the rooms with music; deck the thorough- 
fares with monuments to science, art, literature, and 
the good deeds of man; let the procession of intellect 
and inventive genius, hearing aloft the trophies of 
conquest, move on — it is all a part of humanity's on- 
ward march, but only a part. 

Moral progress has not kept abreast of it. Perhaps 
that is human; it is, but our planet has glowed less 
with joy because it has not been more divine. How 
about our wealth, our literature, our politics, our 
home-life, our fashion, our conversation, our religion? 
Have we advanced in our ideas of duty in all these 
fields of activity, upon which material progress has 
shed its warmest rays? How about our suffering pov- 
erty, our shallow and unwholesome books, our cor- 
rupt office-seeking, the careless and insipid family 
circles, the baleful fashions that tell of disease and 
murder, our vain and faithless words, our outward 
show of religion? 

These are the belongings of materialism. God's 
sweet spirit, with which he breathes beauty into the 
landscape, loveliness into the flower, grandeur into 
the stars, and a heartfelt benediction in the sincere 
and helpful deed — these are not here. Knowledge 
has not locked arms with understanding. I do not 
say much has not been done. Every landscape and 
stretch of water, and nook and corner of busy life, is 
warmer and fairer, 



Moral Aspects of Education. 21 

In some things we have been faithful to spirit, but 
not in all, and not in the greater things. Our 
thought, our art, our education, our religion have 
been too pinched, too sordid, too sullen. The inspira- 
tion has sulked, and the imagination has swept low. 
But the renaissance of soul is dawning, when the 
lovely, lowly life of Christ among the lilies and the 
children, his prayer, and sermon on the mount, ap- 
peal to all men of thought and purpose as nearer to 
real life, because of the steam-engine and the dy- 
namo; for underneath every wheel and shaft and 
coupling: is the law of the snownake and sunbeam 
that dwelt in the Holy Spirit from the beginning, 
and filled the universe with a still, small voice before 
time began. 

My friends, we need a new Protestantism, a re- 
statement of faith, that recognizes the divine imma- 
nence and embodies a sweeter and deeper reverence 
for all things. The old Protestantism is somewhat 
worn. It has done its work. The defiance of hier- 
archical despotism has resulted in a liberty which we 
should now enjoy. Too many people believe that the 
Christian era began with Martin Luther. Hail, ever, 
to that great soul! But if there was ever a golden 
summit in history, it is now, when form and dogma 
are fading before love and service, and worship is not 
a ceremony merely, but a life. 

Is this painting a fancy? Go into the machinery 
and trading world, and you will find the reformation 
already stirring itself in the exaction of an identity 
between religion and life, between deed and duty. 
And this demand is not limited to operations of char- 
ity and sentimental visits among the slummies, but 



22 Keynotes of Education. 

it extends to that larger life which is the Infinite's, 
where the heart absorbs the sweet and merciful es- 
sence of things as the mountain-top welcomes the 
sunrise. We must not blame the world too much. 
It follows quite as closely our religion and our educa- 
tion as we ought, possibly, to expect or desire. 

It is a personal question. Whose company will we 
seek? With whom will we walk and talk and think? 
With God or Mammon? There is where we command 
our evolution. We determine there our association 
and environment. It is the point, when Fate comes 
to each with the question, Whither will ye go, up- 
wards or downwards? This is the science of life. It 
is here where Darwinism meets the soul with the 
problem of destiny. 

It is a mighty question: Under what king? It is 
not met by hanging mottoes on the wall, by studying 
French, and playing the piano. It comes in a resolu- 
tion of the soul to meet God's Spirit, whose still, small 
voice is heard in everything, and whose greeting 
breaks into a thousand smiles wherever we turn. In 
psalm and droning beetle, in beatitude and waving 
grass, it is there; and "Bemember now thy Creator" 
is sung by every bird and repeated by every tinkling 
waterfall. 

The capacities of the soul to chord with the beauti- 
ful harmonies that hold all things to God's purpose 
is the special gift to man, and is the grand fact upon 
which true education is based. It is the rock of truth. 
And if we bow down to wood and stone; if we worship 
our Latin or oar Analysis; if we cloud our intuition 
with dialectics, we build on the sand, and our lives 
shift with it. 



Moral Aspects of Education. 23 

My friends, I hope no one will think I am han- 
dling vapors; that I am simply decorating hard experi- 
ence with soft-hued sentiment. The thought I bring 
you to-day is as deep-set as the verities of the Eternal, 
and as practical as digging a garden. 

I exalt education to the heights of religion, and 
when you think about it — and I ask you to think 
about it — you will not discover by any test of logic, by 
any principle of criticism, even the width of a hair be- 
tween them. They are the same, and all educational 
effort, every educational institution, all study and all 
discipline that recognizes a difference, is faithless to 
humanity and God. 

I do not say this because I speak to-day under the 
auspices of a religious institution. I try to speak 
from the centrality of things without reference. We 
may need these thoughts here, and I dare say we do, 
as well as at Harvard, Vassar, or even Princeton. 
But these are the heights we must seek if we would 
be true men and women. We can not imagine our 
duty different in moral principle and practical life. 

There is somewhat of happy suggestion in the 
Pythagorean philosophy, where all things have a nu- 
merical relation, and the future is the third term of 
an equation. A gentle correspondence rules the uni- 
verse, and the sequences come as in cold and ice, 
wind and wave, desire and deed, love and duty, here 
and somewhere. 

God makes no half hinges, as Cook was so fond of 
repeating. There is something for every longing. 
The stars are the answers to the law of gravitation, 
the flashing rosebush to the burst of dawn, the 
thoughts of the heart to God's sweet truth. We may 



24 Keynotes of Education. 

be faithless, we may be false; but we answer with our 
lives. For every necessity there is an energy of the 
soul waiting to build an altar. Shall we make it 
beautiful with courage, sacrifice, love, and truth, or 
shall we make it ugly with cowardice, selfishness, 
prejudice, and falsehood? 

That is a more practical question than we are apt 
to think. It is as practical as a counting-room prob- 
lem. It may be drowned by the din, the dust, the 
ceaseless palaver of factory and mart; but in the 
silence of the soul's deep thinking it comes like the 
voice of Fate. We can not escape the fulfillment. 

I once stood in the King's Chamber in the center 
of Cheops. The gloom was intense, and the light 
radiated hardly a foot from the taper held in the 
Arab's hand. I looked around and said to myself, 
"Where is the king?" He was gone, but I felt that 
his soul had been built into the black mass of adamant 
about me. 

So we build ourselves into conduct and work and 
word and thought. It is quite essential that we pro- 
ject into life the pure and true, and that we build 
from designs obtained from the Architect who 
planned the lily of the valley and sprung the dome of 
the skies. And what are these plans? The word 
fitly spoken, the act that needs a kindness, the duty 
that demands a sacrifice, the tired heart that weeps 
for comfort, the cause that needs assistance, and 
wherever a willing hand may wait on truth and 
virtue. 

And yet, life is not altogether altruism, or a nun- 
nery, or an errand of charity; and neither is it an an- 



Moral Aspects of Education. 25 

gelic sweep of destiny, or the gathering of hosts for 
Armageddon. It is a plain, ordinary, every-day af- 
fair, in which toil is touched with pain, and purpose 
mingled with misgiving. It is a personal matter, 
which one must attend to, in store and field, and in 
shop and home. How one attends to it depends upon 
whether one is a clod, a phrase, an appetite, or a 
spirit. 

And this depends upon one's education or environ- 
ment, which is mostly in one's keeping. He can deck 
his life with the tawdry of the hour, or with jewels 
that shine more and more unto the perfect day. He 
can infuse into the commonplace of his every-day 
coming and going that graceful dignity, that sweet 
coiirtesy, that gentle speech, that helpful hand, that 
simple truth which God has put into the essence of 
all things pure and holy. Shall we catch this loving 
ideality which he intends for us? Shall our education 
be directed towards its achievement? Then we must 
get behind the matter, where God's thought lingers, 
and under its sway build our lives into heavenly 
mansions. 

Let us not be afraid of ideality. Let not the long 
word transcendentalism frighten us from the path of 
the spirit. I would rather live in a castle in Spain 
than in a mud hut. Let us grasp at all the golden 
chains let down from heaven, even if we do not seize 
them. The exercise is an uplift. 

The athlete whirling on the trapeze does not expect 
to repeat the exercise in the counting-room; but that 
exercise gives him poise and mastery in his quiet 
moments. And so this leaning out towards the In- 



26 Keynotes of Education. 

finite, this inhaling the air of the beautiful beyond, 
generates those forces of spirit that make life mel- 
lifluent and floral. 

Kichard Kealf, John Brown's Secretary of State, 
of the Kepublic of Freedom that lay way out in the 
mirage, which has since dissolved, and unveiled a real 
land of freedom, thus sang: 

"Fair are the flowers and the children, but their subtle 
suggestion is fairer; 

Rare is the roseburst at dawn, but the secret that clasps 
it is rarer ; 

Sweet the exultance of song, but the strain that precedes 
it is sweeter ; 

And never was poem yet writ but the meaning out- 
mastered the meter. 

Never a daisy that grows but a mystery guideth the 
growing: 

Never a river that flows but a majesty scepters the flow- 
ing; 

Never a Shakespeare that soared but a stronger than he 
did enfold him ; 

Never a prophet foretells but a mightier seer hath fore- 
told him. 

Back of the canvas that throbs, the painter is hinted and 

hidden ; 
Into the statue that breathes, the soul of the sculptor is 

hidden ; 
Under the joy that is felt lie the infinite issues of feeling ; 
Crowning the glory revealed is the glory that crowns the 

revealing. 

Great are the symbols of being, but that which is sym- 

boled is greater ; 
Vast the create and behold, but vaster the inward 

creator ; 



Moral Aspects of Education. 27 

Back of the sound broods the silence, back of the gift 

stands the giving ; 
Back of the hand that receives, thrill the sensitive nerves 

of receiving. 

Space is as nothing to spirit, the deed is outdone by the 

doing ; 
The heart of the wooer is warm, but warmer the heart of 

the wooing ; 
And up from the pits where these shiver, and up from 

the heights where those shine, 
Twin voices and shadows swim starward, and the essence 

of life is divine." 



TENDENCIES. 

'X 1 ENDENCY is the greatest fact in human experi- 
* ence. Whither is the key to what. It makes 
no difference what we seem, the direction we are go- 
ing determines what we are. The man who is low 
down, and is tending upward, is nearer God than the 
man who is high up and is tending downward. 

Standing still is going somewhere. God never 
made an idle moment for the human soul. There is 
no negation. Who is not for me is against me. This 
alternative is the zenith of every human life. We 
make our choice of something. One can not imagine 
anything that is not moving from here to there. 
There is nothing standing. The very ruins are fall- 
ing to pieces. The North Star came up from the 
south and is going back again. Old Heraclitus was 
right — change is the essence of all things. 

There is an incessant becoming. Not only are all 
the atoms dashing and plunging for new positions, 
but every star that gems the night is going somewhere. 
The very air has changed. The sunbeam has grown 
brighter. The vital force has added other cells. 
There is a new world every morning — new conditions, 
new opportunities, new risks. 

Old Troy is composed of ten strata. It ate, and 
slept, and loved, and died, in layers. Ages are sand- 
wiched in the debris of dynasties and civilizations. 
A spade full of clay, sprinkled with trinkets, contains 
the hopes, the joys, the sorrows of humanity only a 

28 



Tendencies. 29 



few thousand years ago. Its dream has passed into 
dust. A little longing, a little yearning, a little gaz- 
ing upward, lingers yet in this beautiful gem, this 
graceful statuette, this fair embossment; all else has 
faded, as the sunset fades into the night. 

Must it needs be, then, that we are caught in the 
swirl of circumstances, and tossed about upon the tide, 
or washed ashore, like drift? Must we then be pup- 
pets of change, like the weather, and accept our 
places on the level of the dust? Shall we take our 
chances with the molecule, or with the eternal spirit? 

Let us to-night go back to primary facts. Let us 
comprehend the majesty of life. Let us confront the 
problem of the soul. There is no grander question 
than that which a young man or young woman can 
propose to themselves, whither am I bound? What 
may I do to justify my life when the soul rallies its 
memories in the dim eternities? Shall these loves, 
these sympathies, these ambitions, these longings, 
with which God has filled the soul, make life sacred 
and beautiful, or profane and ugly? This issue meets 
us at every step. It is the alternative to-night. 
Which way? Not, how much? 'T is not how much 
Latin, geometry, or chemistry you have, as what you 
are going to do with it. Does it kindle a purpose? 
Does it form a tendency? Or does it succumb to 
materialism, and waste itself on sordid ends down in 
the ruts and gullies of life? 

To begin with, we must think of the soul as a 
force. I believe in the divinely-anointed Ego; the 
imperial subjective that turns discords into har- 
monies, and drives chance away from the throne of 



30 Keynotes of Education. 

divine authority. "We must condition our destiny 
upon the somethingness of ourselves. God never 
loses sight of the identity of a single soul. Poised 
delicately in a world of circumstance, it possesses 
the dignity of self-assertion, and bends its course to- 
ward the haven of its own desires. 

Still, I do not deny the sovereignty of circum- 
stance; but I do affirm that every man has the 
chance of being a hero before he is obliged to accept 
the fate of a victim. If we are the creatures of en- 
vironment, let us choose that environment which will 
keep us clean and pure. This is the summit of edu- 
cation — the choosing. 

If our books and recitations do not assist us to 
this choice, we have gathered darkness for our pains. 
If, in our straining after knowledge, we have not 
come close to the Infinite and His beauty and love; if 
we have not attuned ourselves to the harmonies which 
embrace all that is noble and true; if we have not 
caught our inspiration from every little event of 
God's loving purpose in home, in flower, in sacred 
song, in mother's love, in lofty sacrifice, we have re- 
fused the divinest equipment that can adorn the 
human soul, and surrendered our judgment over to 
the adventure of the moment. 

The first duty of education is to get us to start 
right — not to trust to the luck of to-morrow. And 
what is starting right? Eecognizing God, and duty, 
and honor, and temperance, and purity, and decency, 
and putting ourselves where these things are recog- 
nized. It is absolute folly and wickedness to stand 
around and practice our human sophistry on these 



Tendencies. 31 



divine energies. We must look upon them as fixed 
facts, stern and relentless as a shore of rock to the 
beating waves. Waiting for environment to deter- 
mine one's tendency is risking all on the throw of a 
die. We should choose the environment now; or per- 
haps earlier in youth; when the dreams were fairer, 
the emotions truer, and we dwelt in the sweet faith 
of home. 

The tenderest influence in all this world is a moth- 
er's prayer, and the loftiest testimony any young 
man or woman can render to the memory of that 
loving soul, is to help God answer that prayer. Am- 
bition, fame, wealth, culture, are too unwieldy and 
rude, if they ever crowd out that splendid duty. 

Eight here is the place to start, where the mother's 
beautiful lips plead that her boy or girl may be true 
and pure, brave and self-denying. Kicher and diviner 
are those limping words than all the pages of Soc- 
rates, Aurelius, or Emerson. When we turn from 
them as the paroxysm of an idle faith, we abandon 
the simple truth of God and suppress the fairest ten- 
dency Heaven has sent us since the Transfiguration. 

I hope the summer mornings of boyhood will last; 
that the love of the johnny- jumpups and wild honey- 
suckles will never fail; that the birds will forever sing 
in the heart, as they did down in the happy valley of 
youth. We never get nearer to God than in those 
early days when our souls came fresh from his hands. 
The first and greatest duty is to stay there; but its 
very value makes it the more difficult. 

The whole world is arrayed against the simplicity 
of youth and duty. To-morrow, legions will confront 



32 Keynotes -of Education. 

you with enticement, selfish purpose, and yellow opin- 
ion. Every true purpose that nerves your soul will 
have its special foe, and the grandeur of life will de- 
pend upon the battle then to take place: Which will 
win? 

The preparation for this conflict is the only educa- 
tion that is worth the name. If our classics, our 
mathematics, our sciences, have not strengthened us 
to overcome these foes, we might just as well have re- 
mained in ignorance. There is a moral side to every 
thought and fact, and the first duty of culture is to 
recognize this. Materialism minimizes or ignores this 
truth, and discerns in matter the potency of all 
knowledge. 

One may safely go through this life, if, like the 
man of science, he walks the cool ridges of investiga- 
tion, and pursues the fleeting atoms till they lose 
themselves in the glorious unseen; but for common 
mortals like ourselves, down on the plane of life, 
tempted on every side, beset by envy and malice, sur- 
rounded by sorrow and misfortune, linked to associa- 
tion that smiles and promises, and heated by desires 
that are always clamoring — to found one's destiny on 
a physical basis is treachery to the soul and a defiance 
of eternal doom. The finest prowess of youth is moral 
heroism. 

The lesson of the hour is to start right — start with 
God and faith and simple duty. Our broadest future 
is in the next step we make. Our noblest castles are 
built right here, out of the clay at our feet, and not 
in the mirage beyond. One thing to do is to start by 
recognizing our own identity, our own integrity, our 



Tendencies. 33 



own inherent force; and that is absolutely impossible, 
unless we recognize the divine sovereignty. 

I speak as a man of the world upon the theme of 
success in life, and I say there can be no real success, 
no true triumph, unless God's hand is in the victory. 
We all acknowledge that God reigns. His loving 
benediction rests upon us in field and woodland these 
happy days of May. We see him in leaf and flower, 
in trickling brook and burning stars; we hear him in 
the songs of the birds and the tones of the church- 
bells; we discern his fingers tracing the stripes and 
planting the stars in "Old Glory;" we can see him, 
every step of the way, from a star-mist to a world full 
of human souls, and thence on to the gates of heaven; 
and yet we hesitate, and argue, and run away, when it 
comes to extending this authority over our little lives, 
to make them beautiful and lofty, too. 

Somehow we affect to think that the divine sov- 
ereignty, which unfolds the spirals of a nebula beyond 
the stars, and peoples a grain of musk with a thousand 
lives, will leave our souls out of the account, to reel 
amid the order of things, to trample at will upon the 
"Thou shalts," and then take part in that divine har- 
mony which is the exhalation of Infinite Love. Tins 
matter is not merely a theological or ethical problem, 
but a practical one, too. 

It is very easy to formulate it into a faith — really, 
an intelligent man can hardly help doing that little — 
but to project it into one's life, and make it regnant 
in one's office, or store, or shop, and to guide one in 
society, or politics, or church; and to stand loyally to 
that endowment of the soul, upon which the good 
3 



34 Keynotes of Education. 

Allfather has impressed somewhat of his own 
strength and dignity, is the highest heroism of human 
nature. 

Our methods of education incline too much to 
regard man as an intellect to be furnished with knowl- 
edge — a jar to he packed with facts to he taken out 
as they are needed. They almost ignore the other 
powers of the soul — to feel and to will — imperial 
faculties that determine the man. Think what little 
knowing is. If one had all knowledge, it would be 
little worth if one had no emotions and no purpose. 
It would be like a great machine-shop, filled with en- 
gines, tools, iron, patterns, and no fire under the boil- 
ers and the engineer gone. 

What is needed is the living force; the Spirit of 
God breathed on the knowledge. The doctrine of the 
correlation of forces is not limited to the field of 
physics; it belongs to the mental and moral realm as 
well. There is a relation between knowledge, mental- 
ity, ethics, and charity; a relation so close that one 
passes into the other. It is the highest correlation 
that illustrates the unity of truth, as light, heat, and 
electricity illustrate the unity of force. 

What a little world this would be if we could pen 
heat in a crucible as a little unrelated power, separat- 
ing the oxygen and carbon, like the grains fall away 
from the soft sand rock! Or that lamp yonder is sim- 
ply the union of two elements making a third, and 
that is the end of it. Or that yon streak of lightning 
is only a little subtle fluid ripping around in the skies, 
and leaving only a burst of thunder! That little 
flame is linked to the winds, that lamplight sings with 



Te7idencies . 35 



every shining orb, and upon that flash of lightning 
the universe is built. 

Into the sanctuary of these great facts, true educa- 
tion bids us enter; and not only to recognize these 
physical relations, but the moral relations which go 
with them, and which is the fairer and truer side of 
them; for as the heat, light, and electricity are the 
varying vibrations of God's power, so are courage, 
courtesy, justice, and purity the varying pulsations of 
his love. 

A choice must be made. We can not depend upon 
our conjugations and cube-roots to carry us through. 
An old Greek philosopher said, "Much learning 
teaches not wisdom." The bare facts of materialism 
never raised a soul above the soil. There is some one 
back of gravitation, expansion, and chemical affinity, 
of whom these are but the finger traces. "What is this 
inscription written on every leaf, dewdrop, snownake, 
wisp of cloud, and track of meteor? That nothing 
lives for itself alone, or will forever disappear, or 
might not have been. The violet that blooms in your 
garden is as great in God's sight as splendid Orion. 
They came together in the morning of the world, and 
will go out when time closes. Amid all things, and 
through all centuries, runs this infinite purpose, 
which constitutes the ethics of life, and which it is 
your prerogative and mine to serve or impede. 

I do not want to hide my meaning in the glow of 
sentimental phrases. Let us be thoroughly frank. 
Here is an object, whose center of gravity is beyond its 
base. It falls; we say that it is its weight that brings 
it down. Yes; but the whole earth has been pulling 



36 Keynotes of Education. 

at it; and a sky full of stars has seized it and dragged 
it down; every comet that sails the depths of night, 
and every nebula that floats along the horizons of 
heaven, clamor for its downfall. Dip a piece of blue 
litmus into an acid, and if the paper does not turn 
red, the universe will dissolve, for in that simple reac- 
tion, we behold one of the foundations that held up 
the beauty, order, and grandeur of the world since the 
creation. 

We need not look for some golden chain connect- 
ing the physical and the moral law; they are as close 
together as a mother's lips and a mother's love; they 
are the same, both moral. The logic is as beautiful 
as a strand of pearls. The gentle May opens the buds; 
then come the flowers, and after a while the fruit 
which brings life, where duty enters, and then God 
smiles bush and tree into bloom again. 

Not more surely is the physical law fixed in the 
relations of all things and all time than is the divine 
purpose that determines the moral law. Every 
thought, act, dream, and intent of our lives must be 
brought to the straight edge of truth and justice, and 
by that be judged. 

We may think the law will be suspended on our 
account, and for a while we may reap better than we 
sow; that we may gather grapes of thorns, and that 
action and reaction are not equal. We may think 
God will dally with error; that he will abdicate his 
throne to temporize with mere pretense and youthful 
folly. But it can never be. When the less contains 
the greater, when two and two make five, then, and 
not till then, will the moral law lose its force or forget 
its judgments. 



Tendencies. 37 



This is a fact above all the facts of the text-book. 
It stands at the front of all knowledge. It is the 
basic idea of human life. Whoever breaks the har- 
mony of God's republic must suffer the penalty. 
Blasphemy, drunkenness, lying, cheating, false swear- 
ing, gambling, every impure thought and deed, is 
each of itself an overt act of treason against the Al- 
mighty. If one of these should triumph; if the re- 
sultant of any of these would be success and joy, the 
universe will shrivel into a cinder. The decree of the 
Infinite must be enforced. It may not be to-day, or 
even to-morrow; but some day, sooner or later, the 
relentless executioner comes along. You can see his 
footsteps in a thousand blighted lives. Every jail, 
penitentiary, infirmary, and asylum is a monument to 
his unforgetting vengeance. He fills society with 
disordered homes, rebellious children, fashionable 
novels, and empty gossip. 

He unnerves the conscience and weakens the judg- 
ment, by diluting the brain with alcohol, opiates, and 
narcotics. And the beautiful intellect, sufficient to 
the contemplation of truth and innocence, is stained 
by impurity, prejudice, envy, and hatred. There is 
no one here who does not feel in some way or some 
degree, in some fit of mind or lapse of nerve or 
muscle, the cold hand of the executioner upon him 
to-night. And there is not a penalty that we may not 
trace back to something that we might do to-morrow. 

terrible is this logic of life! But it is a lesson that 
we must learn, we must understand, we must utilize, 
if we would be true men and women. This is the 
thought I bring you to-night. All time and eternity, 
all the universe, from the mote riding the sunbeam to 



38 Keynotes of Education. 

the galaxy spanning the heavens, is on the side of the 
man who does the right; and they are against the man 
who is in the wrong. Their judgments may be de- 
layed. They may not come to-day; but to-morrow, or 
next day, the dreadful ergo will be drawn against us. 

The highest purpose of education is not so much to 
know, to think, or to argue, as it is to travel the right 
road. It is a matter of no consequence for a man to 
speak correctly, if he does not speak the truth. Math- 
ematics has done a poor service in training one to 
think, if it has not made him thoughtful, also. The 
annals of history litter the memory if they do not in- 
spire one to emulate the virtue, the devotion, the 
courage of those who make them resplendent. Eead- 
ing is no better than loitering if we do not learn to 
read, over the feast of luxury and licentiousness, the 
handwriting on the wall. Our classical culture de- 
scends to profligacy and hypocrisy unless truth and 
virtue fill every fond dream. 

You will find the habit of life against this view. 
Materialism occupies the markets, the avenues, the 
offices, the politics, the schools, and, I might say, too 
often the churches. It comes wherever we turn, in- 
viting us to indolence and pleasure, to superficial 
sights and empty sounds. It sets up every moment 
to selfish joy. 

Materialism, with its jeweled hand, seeks to beckon 
us ever to a carnival. The tree of knowledge grows in 
every Eden of life, and we eat its fruit with a relish. 
Science and inventive genius have gilded the material 
with beauty and glory. Art, architecture, and litera- 
ture touch the soul with passions of delight. Our 



Tendencies. 39 



music sets us whirling in a maze of mystic fancies. 
The spirit of the age is toward materialism and sen- 
sualism. Things, facts, objects, and how they can 
minister to sense, selfishness, and the joy of to-day, is 
the trend of modern life. 

The end no one can see. There are lurid flashes in 
the mists ahead. Dark clouds are rolling across the 
brow of to-morrow. Behind all the dazzle and shim- 
mer of these days of advance, God's judgment is yet 
to be. What will he think? The answer to that 
question, as it comes to our own souls, presents a life 
purpose for every one of us, and opens to the future 
the beautiful gates of hope. 

My friends, never in the history of the world have 
Duty and Sacrifice offered to Heroism such splendid 
opportunities as they do to-day. It is not a conflict 
of cannon and physical endurance. There is no 
triumphal procession, no waving of banners, or cele- 
bration of military glory. The struggle is silent, 
persistent, every day, everywhere. The battle-field 
is here in this hall, and spreads forth to wherever 
you may go. The foe is whoever comes to tear down 
our ideals of duty, or to challenge the authority of 
God over us. 

Every influence that brings lack of faith, weakness 
of purpose, longing for indolence, or insincerity of 
speech, is an enemy. Every lie, deceit, injustice, pro- 
fane word, impure story, or disrespect of sacred 
things, is an adversary. One finds an infinite antago- 
nism in bad books, bad papers, bad shows, bad com- 
panions. 

Then, too, society surrounds one with its fashions, 



40 Keynotes of Education. 

its games, its gossips, its insipid froth and nervous 
fuss, and decoys one away from the true conflict. 
Every indulgence that poisons the blood or mangles 
the nerves, so that the soul loses its energy to think 
or will, attacks the citadel of manhood. Wherever 
one turns in this changeful world, some friend of the 
wrong appears, to lure or drag one into the haunts of 
madness and mockery. Every man has his private 
Apollyon, says Miss Mulock; and he has his confeder- 
ates wherever one goes — in society, in trade, in poli- 
tics, in church. 

It is the duty of education to encounter these hos- 
tilities with a clear head and a strong heart. Do not 
think it is the special province of religion to combat 
wrong, or that it is no part of the scholars duty to 
contend for righteousness. Eeligion and education 
go together. They are one. They are both the un- 
folding of the divine energy with which the soul is 
endowed. Science, literature, philosophy, without 
God, is like the heavens without the sun. Even math- 
ematics is based on a truth got direct from the throne 
of the Infinite. 

I am not speaking in a theological sense, though I 
might as well, but from that deep reverence for truth 
which is the Eternal's, and which is as grand in your 
own little life as it is in an archangel's. If in every 
rock, blossom, raindrop, floating cloud, flashing me- 
teor, and dreamy bend of river, we do not see some- 
thing more than the dry bones of fact; if we do not 
feel a link of harmony breaking into a chorus of love 
and duty; if we do not discern among them, those 
touches of the infinite truth, that sweet relation of 



Tendencies. 41 



things which clings to us as we go about among our 
fellows, unfolding our destiny in deeds and words, 
then our education has been scanty, stale, and 
starving. 

A man is no scholar who thinks that moral duty 
is taught by Moses or St. Paul only. Sometimes we 
hear men ask why God has not written across the 
skies, in letters of light, the message of the dove, that 
all men might read. He has — across the skies with 
blazing suns; along the horizon with mountain sum- 
mits; on every rainbow, tinted with promise by the 
fingers of the sunbeam. 

There is a moral side to everything. God teaches 
a lesson in the dead grass, the chill wind, the stagnant 
pool, as well as in the Psalms or the Beatitudes. All 
knowledge is divine. It makes life serious and sacred. 
Take morality out of trade, art, politics, education, or 
society, and there is nothing left but ashes. Consider 
trade, for instance, without moral principles. It 
would go to wreck in a year. Politics is not worth the 
bother of a moment, apart from righteous duty. 

Look at our art and literature, without an ethical 
purpose, filling the hearts and minds of the people 
with dirt and meanness. And our education, with its 
tricks at words and figures, and its earthly informa- 
tion, beguiling the beautiful souls of the youth into 
superficial and selfish lives. 

The way we look at things unfolds our destiny. 
You remember the old Hebrew saying, I think it was, 
"God delights in adverbs." How the action word is 
getting along is the main thing. The noun is abject, 
it makes no difference how many fine adjectives clus- 



42 Keynotes of Education. 

ter about it, if it is not doing well. The quality of 
the doing figures in the divine syntax. We can not 
make the action fine out of mean modifiers. We build 
mud huts of mud. It takes meanness to do mean 
things. Strike a false note, and the harmony of all 
things turns into discord. Whoever tries to build a 
good life out of the dead bark, the green scum, or the 
livid putrescence of things, will fail utterly. We must 
go beneath, to the inner meaning. We must ask what 
God wants of this ear of corn, this blooming rose- 
bush, this sweet whistle of the meadow-lark, this 
lovely drapery of the evening, this lustrous vigil of 
Jupiter in the zenith to-night. 

Is there nothing in them, nothing back of them, 
that makes life purer and nobler, that inclines you to 
turn to your friend, and say, "Let us keep our lives 
in harmony with all this joy and grace; let every step 
touch the trend along which God's will runs?" 

A true life is a plain matter — as simple as the 
Lord's Prayer, or the growing of a lily, or the sparkle 
of a diamond. It is straight and clean — no fuss or 
fury, or the raising of dust. We get our ideas of life 
often from pictures in books, where an orator is bran- 
dishing a harangue before an excited crowd, or a man 
on a prancing steed, in the gale of battle, is waving a 
sword over a scene of blood and groans. This is no 
more of life than a hanging or going up in a balloon. 
It exists only in spots. 

One's life is a quiet, uneventful, impatient sort of 
thing, known only to a few neighbors, and, possibly, 
a few others over in the next town. It mostly con- 
cerns one's self; not in a selfish point of view, for it 



Tendencies. 43 

is only best when it blesses others. God has a law for 
every act and deed, as he has for every leaf and drop 
of water. 

He has told something about it in the Sermon on 
the Mount, where every triumph is gained by pure, 
modest, peaceable, honest, straightforward lives. Self- 
ishness, ambition, wealth, nowhere breaks through 
the lines with the promise of a joy. Even the vicissi- 
tude that demands courage and daring brings with it, 
if real, the modesty of a simple faith. 

"Lead, Kindly Light," is not only the sweetest 
song, but the grandest prayer of humanity. Not 
what the papers think, or the public, or society; but, 
What does God think? is the question for every heroic 
soul. 

I would not soften the matter by a single line of 
sentiment. I make the issue as bold and blunt as An- 
glo-Saxon can present it — if a man ignores God and 
moral duty, his lif e will be a failure. He may acquire 
wealth, he may direct great interests, he may go to 
Congress, he may preside over courts, the crowd may 
follow him with loud hurrahs; but unless he recog- 
nizes Infinite truth and justice in all things, his suc- 
cess is a sham, filled with disaster and regret. 

If he bases his destiny upon the idea that a lie may 
win, that selfishness may succeed, that impurity may 
exalt, that injustice may endure, that indolence and 
craftiness may flaunt banners of victory along the 
way, he might as well expect a prism to turn light 
into black, that action and reaction will be unequal, 
or that a rock will soar like a wisp of cloud. 

It is absolutely absurd, and to true scholarship it 



44 Keynotes of Education. 

is positively wicked, to hold that natural law is regu- 
lar and persistent, but that moral law staggers around 
at haphazard through a masquerade of virtues and 
vices, not knowing and not caring which it chooses. 

Through all knowledge, art, classics, philosophies; 
through all text-books, experiments, and plans, breaks 
this alternative — which side? To no one does the 
issue come with more force than to the boy and girl 
stepping from the schoolroom to project their learn- 
ing into conduct. 

The trouble will not be the lack of knowledge, so 
much as the lack of that divine volition which trans- 
forms knowledge into life. 

Society and business will seek by every flattery, 
enticement, and subterfuge to neutralize the volition 
and bring that boy or girl into the wild and empty 
chase of fashion and folly, of luxury and ease. It will 
be a thousand to one against him. He will find soon 
that he can depend upon no one but himself and the 
good Allfather. 

Success in this world is not achieved by idlers or 
puppets, or those who drift along in the shallows; 
but by men and women of heart, of insight, of defi- 
ance, who see the inside of things, the essence of 
things, where God's purpose is written and his love 
is manifest, and stand faithfully by the duty com- 
mitted to their hands. This is education. This is true 
scholarship. This is the corner-stone of the auton- 
omy of manhood. 

It is sad to realize how many temptations encircle 
the boy and girl when they leave the schoolroom. To- 
morrow, perhaps, the genial, loving, beautiful home- 



Tendencies. 45 



life ends. There, solicitude, watchfulness, and sweet 
expectation hover about one always; but real life be- 
gins now, and they melt into tender memories, and 
in their places come — 0! so slow — the fair opportu- 
nities and bright missions that hope had spread out 
over the fields of the future. 

Soon one finds that his algebra, his Latin, his pars- 
ing, his composition, are not equal to the task of 
reducing his bright anticipations to beautiful experi- 
ence. A link of the golden chain seems to be gone. 
Ah, then is the most stupendous moment of a boy's 
life! In his anxiety and impatience, he looks around, 
and, to escape despair, he seeks the crowd on the 
corner. 

That is the first step in the wrong direction. By 
and by these enticing influences gather closer about 
him, and he begins to think that, after all, life is only 
a matter of clothes, of pastimes, of games, of dances, 
of cigarettes, of gossip in parlor and store, and the 
blinking effervescence of daily ado. 

Soon the sacred purpose is gone, the happy im- 
pulse of youth weakens, the better tendencies of home 
and school slip by, and the boy floats in the drift down 
the river of life, soon to be soaked with the follies and 
falsehoods of the age, and to sink out of sight 
forever. 

0! there is a truer way. There is a manlier ten- 
dency, where the boy declares his independence and 
self-respect; defends his identity before God; and 
along the years that follow, if need be, fights his way 
through crusts, patched clothes, cold neglect, and 
self-denial, past rifle-pits and barbed-wire jungles, up 



46 Keynotes of Education. 

the slope to the summit, to take from the hand of the 
Infinite the laurels of victory. 

True success does not coalesce with the selfish 
spirit of this age. Heroic tendency crosses at every 
angle the whims and aspirations of society. We 
must make up our minds to this fact. We must say 
whether we purpose to lose ourself or save ourself. 
The problem is as plain as the forks of a road. 

Mind you, I do not proclaim an asceticism. We 
have too much cloistered religion in this world. The 
man who sees and talks to God only in the closet is a 
coward and a hypocrite. It is on the street, in the 
midst of affairs, where men gather, that one must 
carry his moral purpose. It is in business, in politics, 
in society, that true scholarship must stand up and 
be counted. Divine graces never fit one better than 
in the field of duty. 

We somehow catch an idea, that when moral pur- 
pose is most needed it may be most neglected. We 
want to chase it back to the flowers, the birds, the 
brooks, the crimson sunsets, the purple crests of the 
hills, the love-glances of the evening star, or to the 
Beatitudes, anywhere from the realm of real life and 
the dealings with our brother. 

The highest achievement of education is to weld 
the link that connects the divine purpose with hu- 
man conduct. That is what the orthography, the 
arithmetic, the geology are for— not to make us 
shrewder, or to fill us with knowledge, but to make 
us wise, discerning, faithful, that we may the better 
be able to deck every deed with a virtue and adorn 
every tendency with a grace. 



Tendencies. 47 



I am talking of this world, of the things that con- 
cern us in the struggle for bread and butter. The 
conditions of life are arranged for our good. Success 
is just as definite, determined, as the sowing of wheat 
determines the grinding of flour. Excellence is a 
product of character as well as of skill. You get a 
fine buggy made — the best than can be; the first ride 
out, a felly breaks and the rim caves in. 'T is not 
the fault of the material or the work; the flaw was in 
the character of the man who made it. He was dis- 
honest or negligent. But he made ten dollars by his 
fault. Did he? And was he so lucky as to cheat God, 
too, and gather figs from thistles? "Was the whole 
melody of the universe thrown into discord for his 
comfort and delight? Not a bit of it. Every cent 
carried with it a penalty. It brought him ashes, and 
poison, and pain. It even touched with regret and 
grief the sweet innocence of his children and the 
loving sacrifice of his wife. 

We can not see all these lines of action and reaction 
that cross and recross human experience; we can not 
trace to its beginning this sorrow, this misfortune, 
this pain; we can not follow up the cause of this 
intemperance, this impurity, this indolence, this sac- 
rilege — they are all so hidden in the maze of life; but 
we know what they are. This rotten speck in the 
apple was made by the worm at the root. It had a 
hard struggle of it, coming up through the heart of 
the tree, and fighting away the dews and the sun- 
shine ; but it won, and spoiled the fruit. 

But positive teaching is what we want. It is a 
poor life that is ever defending itself against error. 



48 Keynotes of Education. 

As a matter of practical common sense, the safest, 
surest thing in this world is the right thing. It may- 
require patience, courage, long suffering, and tempo- 
rary loss, but at last it comes. 

We can not hurry God. We can only have faith in 
the promises that he has made to Virtue, Patience, 
Self-denial, Integrity, Industry. Even his blessings 
are not adventitious. They do not drop down on 
personal account. They come as the flowers bloom 
and the birds sing. They come because they have 
to come, out of faith, sacrifice, courage, toil. 

It is a mistake to reserve right thinking and right 
acting for heaven only. They are as necessary to 
earth as to heaven. A righteous life is the foremost 
utility. Progress, enterprise, industry, success, de- 
pend upon the exercise of the highest functions of the 
soul. An earnest life articulates with great achieve- 
ments. Success in life is a matter of the plainest 
logic; it is as direct as the play of a sunbeam on the 
laughing bud. 

A boy goes forth from school, inspired with a 
purpose to be something and do something. He 
looks upon life as an opportunity for manhood and 
duty. He is equipped with integrity, sincerity, purity, 
temperance, enthusiasm, and the tireless energy of 
hand and heart. He turns away from the idlers, the 
gossipers, the seekers after pleasure, the frivolous 
devotees of society, and glorifies his mission with 
self-reliance, courage, and sacrifice. He may not 
wear the plumes of prosperity; he may be even un- 
noticed and discarded; but that is nothing. He keeps 
right on with his work; he learns to love it, to sanctify 



Tendencies. 49 

it with every tender memory of home and school, and 
to bedew it with the wisdom he has gathered from his 
books. 

Day by day he unfolds his purpose. It may be now 
only the plowing of a furrow or the pushing of a 
plane; but he is planting a righteous effort. He is 
sowing the seed of self-reliance and high endeavor. 
He is putting a value on the hours as they go by. 
He is bowing at the altar of beautiful necessity, and, 
with a faith in God, expects an answer by and by. 
There can be but one answer. The stars are on his 
side. For him, the rain falls, the rivers run, and the 
forest waves a million banners. 

Some day he emerges from his toil and sacrifice. 
He brings with him strong muscles, a clean brain, a 
pure heart, and a ready hand. His self-reliance and 
his self-respect have equipped him with talent for 
service. He does not ask for favor; he does not seek 
patronage; he does not follow some great capitalist 
around and beg for work. He has risen to the dignity 
of a necessity himself. He has become a condition 
in the development of things about him; and now 
men come to him because they need him. True 
worth has a wide-open field in this world. In the 
dynamics of life, no force is wasted that is employed 
in the right direction. 

One of the finest and most suggestive lines in the 
Scriptures is that spoken by Christ: "Wist ye not that 
I must be about my Father's business?" It is a reso- 
lution fitting human lips as well as divine. God haa 
as much business in this world as he has over in 
heaven. Heaven can take care of itself. The earth 
4 



50 Keynotes of Education. 

can not. It would go to sticks, if God's hand was 
not holding it in, through the sonls of true, brave, 
virtuous men and women, who make God's business 
their business. 

I speak reverently, but plainly, because I talk from 
the standpoint of practical life. I am here to pro- 
claim the doctrine of applied scholarship; to urge that 
true, pure, active, earnest, self-denying lives is the 
completest expression of God's will on earth, and the 
only surety of final joy and success. The major pre- 
mise of this argument is an axiom that holds up 
the skies. We can not imagine that God runs this 
beautiful world on the idea that indolence, insin- 
cerity, falsehood, drunkenness, sacrilege, will bring a 
blessing to the human heart. 

It makes no difference if these faults appear in the 
channels of business; they condemn the business, and 
it must bear the penalty. If the conduct of a railroad, 
or law-office, or blacksmith-shop, bristles with pro- 
fanity, intemperance, deceit, and impurity, that rail- 
road, that law-office, that blacksmith-shop, will have 
to pay for its faults in dollars or stock, or something 
they will buy, sometime soon. 

There is no exemption. The law belongs to the 
very essence of being, and it never forgets to exact the 
penalty. Strange, passing strange, that scholarship 
does not behold this imperial fact mightier and 
grander than gravitation, that ethics permeates all 
things; that it stands with bruised heart at the open 
grave, and follows the footsteps and fancies every- 
where. 

Which side? What is your tendency? Answer 



Tejidencies. 51 



this question before enthusiasm has taken wings, or 
before hope has been burdened by the vanities of 
life. To-morrow, to-morrow, and to-morrow may de- 
termine all. Two or three things reveal a tendency. 

An astronomer sees a little speck in the skies. 
What is it? He can only tell by finding out where 
it is going. The next night it seems to have moved 
only a minute or two. The third night another al- 
most imperceptible change of place. These three 
points of occupation, so close together that they al- 
most blend, establish direction and destiny; and the 
astronomer marks out the track of a comet among the 
stars, until it recedes into the depthless azure of the 
skies. 

"True worth is in being, not seeming; 

In doing, each day that goes by, 
Some little good — not in dreaming 

Of great things to do by and by. 
For whatever men say, in their blindness, 

And spite of the fancies of youth, 
There 's nothing so kindly as kindness, 

And nothing so royal as truth. 

We get back our mete as we measure — 

We can not do wrong, and feel right ; 
Nor can we give pain and feel pleasure, 

For justice avenges each slight. 
The air for the wing of the sparrow, 

The bush for the robin and wren, 
But always the path that is narrow 

And straight, for the children of men. 

'T is not in the pages of story, 

The heart of its ills to beguile, 
Though he who makes courtships to glory 

Gives all that he hath for a smile ; 



52 Keynotes of Education. 



For when from her heights he has won her, 

Alas ! it is only to prove 
There 's nothing so royal as honor, 

And nothing so loyal as love. 

We can not make bargains for blisses, 

Nor catch them like fishes in nets, 
And sometimes the thing our life misses 

Helps more than the things which it gets ; 
For good lieth not in pursuing, 

Nor gaining of great or of small ; 
But just in the doing, and doing 

As we would be done by, is all." 



POETRY OF THE SKIES. 

LADIES and Gentlemen, — Another observatory! 
■" Another outlook to the skies! Another dome 
through which to gaze at the infinite dome beyond! 
And for what good? There is a utilitarian view that 
shuts out the skies; that will not see star, planet, or 
nebula; that will not fill the deep ethereal spaces with 
a single vision. Yonder is no concern of ours; there 
is nothing in the stars that adds a single pound of 
food or a yard of raiment to the common stock. Once 
I talked with a distinguished astronomer — a gentle- 
man whose investigations had made him famous — 
who deplored the fact that he had not directed his 
destiny into the field of chemistry, whose fruits com- 
prise so many of the choice realities of life. Well, 
I did not share his regrets; and the radiance of his 
labors among the stars so suffuses my reveries that 
bolder figures in practical science blend with the dust 
of progress. We need the chemist, the physicist, the 
geologist, the botanist — the earth is broad, and every 
nook and corner are filled with the wisdom of God 
and the promise of a loftier life. But yonder, where 
night unto night showeth knowledge, and infinity 
unfolds truth in an arch of shining suns, the human 
heart bows for an inspiration and a benediction that 
it can not find anywhere in the paths of life. 

Yes; let us build altars to Utility; let us resolve not 
to raise a pillar or trim a stone that will not serve 
humanity; that will not lift it up and invest it with 

53 



54 Keynotes of Education. 



loftier desires and fairer ideals. Does not beauty 
belong to Utility? Does not grandeur? Does not 
sublimity? Does not every lustrous toucli of the 
divine hand? Are not these investments of the soul 
in the last analysis of courage, of duty, of labor? 
God's own grace of achievement, smiling in flower or 
beaming in star, wins the heart and directs the hand. 

I do not like Emerson's idea that a star expresses 
solitude. It is a multitude of brightest visions. There 
it goes through space, with a chorus of happy worlds 
singing around it. The thoughts mingle with rarest 
company as they go from orb to orb, and people them 
with celestial races linked to the vicissitudes of life. 
It may not be the solid truth we venture upon. It 
may be a dream; it may be a fancy; but dreams and 
fancies break in upon us when we are not aware, and 
help to build reality and adorn life. In no place 
abide influences that evoke nobler dreams of the 
eternity we are all bound for, and the duties that lie 
between, than in the company of the stars. 

A star grows on you. At first, it seems indifferent 
and cold. But never mind; visit it again; cultivate 
it; give it your heart, and soon it will become com- 
panionable and kindly. Some dark night, when the 
clouds part and let it shine on you for a while, you 
will love it and feel it is the one friend you have in 
all the universe. The impression may be entirely 
subjective. Very good; the Divine reaching out to- 
ward serenest mystery, and investing it with the beau- 
tiful ideals that wait on Hope and Love. This lifting 
up from the clod and the weed — what can do it better 
than a star? But the subjective must be exercised. 
It is the most inviting domain of education. 



Poetry of the Skies. 55 

I think it is a fair service to mankind to remove 
the horizon of thought and life from the hilltops to 
the zenith. Every effort to popularize astronomy- 
makes the world truer and happier. It is good to 
look up. It is good to let the fancy run to other 
worlds than ours; to watch them rolling on their end- 
less courses; and io feel the presence of the Infinite 
in their eternal luster. 

There are two kinds of astronomers — the mathe- 
matical and sentimental. The first exists for the sec- 
ond. He measures and weighs with terrestrial stand- 
ards. He unfolds truth from columns of logarithms. 
He changes the face of heaven into a maze of cosines 
and trajectories. It is all right. It is for us, us sen- 
timentals, who gauge the heavens with whorls and 
spirals and the Book of Job. He changes the ever- 
lasting blue into a celestial common, where the hu- 
man heart may liberate its grandest longings. 

Thank Heaven, we have an observatory at last that 
a man may enter without knowing Newton's Prin- 
cipia by heart; a place where the flaming youth and 
the son and daughter of toil may come "to take a peep 
at the stars," and anoint their souls with glimpses 
of the jeweled vistas of this beautiful universe. Let 
the man of science do his noble work; let him calcu- 
late his quantities and guard his limitations; let him 
build high and strong his altars of truth; but for 
every fact, let him know, he adds a greater fancy, and 
the triumph of his science, at last, is the creation of a 
fair and noble sentiment. 

Astronomy will not permit a man to leave the Di- 
vine. This beneficence is the influence of all true 
science; but the objects of astronomical study lie so 



56 Keynotes of Education. 



close to divinity that one is quick to suggest the other 
to the common mind. There is no lesson of infinity, 
eternity, omniscience, omnipresence, anywhere, as one 
can read it in the stars. The lesson may not come to 
us in sounding words of definite phrases. It is not 
necessary. Somewhere, Goethe says: "It is not need- 
ful that truth have a definite shape; it is enough if 
it hovers about like a spirit, producing harmony; if it 
is wafted through the air like the sound of a bell, 
grave and kindly." Such are the gentle influences 
that play about the lover of the stars, and if he be- 
comes ecstatic over what he sees and feels, it is his 
good fortune as well as his privilege. 

I make my plea for the amateur, for the disciple of 
Mitchel, of Proctor, of Serviss. I want an observa- 
tory that exists for the glory of the heavens, where 
the common people may come and behold in the 
glittering constellations the grandest visions of God's 
infinitude and power. And to see it through the tele- 
scope — not on a chart, or a photograph, or a rain- 
bowed spectrum — but through the glass where the 
great worlds shine right on them! They want to see 
the deep, dark space that the suns roll in. In these 
days, Science looks for a solar system like it searches 
for a bacillus — with a microscope, where the glory is 
faded and infinity shrivels to a black speck. Splendid 
are the achievements in this field. A ray of light is a 
messenger bringing wonderful tidings from the far- 
away worlds. It comes with a greeting of fellowship 
from the beautiful cosmos. For more than a century 
it has shot through space to carry us the news of the 
possibilities and potencies of the world it left. The 



Poetry of the Skies. 57 

observatory has dissected a sunbeam, and turned over 
to the laboratory the first intelligence of a new ter- 
restrial element, thus strengthening and rehabilitat- 
ing the nebular hypothesis. The astronomer will look 
upon the iridescent bar and tell whence comes the 
light, as he would recognize the voice of a friend; 
and from the melting of the tints, whether it comes 
or goes. 0, spiritual light, that writes in a rainbow 
alphabet the language of the stars! Some day, some 
day, we will catch the songs they sing. 

All these generous victories of the astronomers, 
and more, the amateur appropriates and turns over to 
his imagination, where God intended they should go. 
I have always liked that phase of Cartesian psychol- 
ogy which fancied the mission of an angel between 
the sensation and the concept. It may not be the 
accepted metaphysics in these stately halls, but it 
explains the fact that the mind gets more than the 
dry details of an object; yes, more than can be seen; 
so faithful is this little ambassador in carrying the 
divine meaning of things to the soul that will receive 
it. And herein is the potency of all knowledge — the 
lesson of the supremacy of love and the majesty of 
truth, that comes to the soul on every wave of light. 

Dare I take a peep through that handsome object- 
ive, and let my thoughts run riot over the brilliant 
scenes so familiar to the learned astronomers about 
me? My good friend who gave it, said I might. It 
belongs to our college, whose progress warms the 
people's pride and whose destiny is bound up in their 
love. I want to penetrate the wilderness of sublimity 
to see with my eyes the influence of the Pleiades — 



58 Keynotes oj Education. 



the Seven Sisters swayed in sweet harmony by a veil 
of star-mist, or as Tennyson describes them, 

"A swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid," 

all journeying southward to the never-ending whither. 
Or away yonder in Aquarius, to behold the spinning 
of a solar system out of the white nebula, and see the 
center breaking away from the circling mist into a 
burning sun. Or over there in Hercules, where a 
chalky spot bursts into a cluster of thousands of 
diamonds, each gem a sun, perhaps with rolling orbs 
around it; here and there a little blur of congested 
ether, fashioned into quaint forms by the gentle in- 
fluences that fill all space, into the slow becoming of 
suns that are to deck the concave, millions of aeons 
hence; those splashes of diamonds in the Northern 
Crown or Berenice's Hair, that dazzle the eye with the 
very chaos of splendor; that band of soft haze 
thrown across the skies, from pole to pole, and each 
mote a sun and the center of the universe; splendid 
Sirius, dragging a dead sun in undulating flight to a 
never-nearing goal; the brilliant cluster in Perseus, 
and near by Algol, whose changing luster tells of a 
great orb circling about the Demon. And there is 
Orion, the grandest pageantry of the skies, with its 
processions of suns, its banners of star-mist, its bright 
and varied colors, its matchless leaders, and its legend 
of prowess; fiery Arcturus, a thousand times larger 
than our sun, coming hither at the rate of fifty miles 
a second, and will for a hundred years, and then veer 
off into space; or, coming to our home circle, gor- 
geous Saturn, with his brilliant rings and many 



Poetry of the Skies. 59 

moons, floating in refulgent ether, where there is no 
night, and where God's great fiat came in fullest re- 
splendence and power, — every star of a different hue, 
declaring its age and condition, some in the vigor of 
youth, some in the decline, and many that have shone 
through millions of ages, cold and dead and unseen. 

The houndless spaces are filled with flying orbs. 
Many of them have long ago burnt out, and yet keep 
up the flight on which they first started in the morn- 
ing of the world. A few years ago a star burst forth 
as splendid as Eigel, in the constellation of Auriga. 
It was a beautiful wonder. In a few weeks its bright- 
ness began to decline. Slowly it dwindled from a star 
of the first magnitude to the sixth, and then it faded 
away forever. What an epic — the burning of a world! 
No Milton or Wagner ever rose to the height of such 
a theme. Away yonder sails a solar system — too far 
distant to send its light to us. Thither speeds a burnt- 
out sun. It crashes in upon the congeries of worlds, 
and smites with flame each circling planet, and leaves 
it a cinder. Let the imagination range all the possi- 
bilities of being, and build up its strangest fancies, 
but it will never match this thrilling reality of the 
skies. It is a romance of the Infinite. 

So the amateur skims along the skies and feeds his 
soul on these inspiring wonders. He may not be able 
to calculate the distance of 61 Cygni, or meas- 
ure the diameter of Vega, or estimate the speed of the 
racer in the Hunting Dogs; but the unapproachable 
majesty of the facts touches him with awe and rever- 
ence just the same. They are verities to the soul; 
and the contemplation of them is a wholesome expe- 



60 Keynotes of Education. 



rience that uplifts life; it is an educational process 
full of treasure. We talk of the influence of art and 
nature on the thoughts of men. It is real and reg- 
nant. But what shall we say of God's art, that covers 
the rotunda of the universe? The heavens declare 
the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his 
handiwork. Here let us learn a duty. Let us bind 
more closely to our education for this life the lesson 
and inspiration that come from the skies. 

So much have I spoken out of my delight for the 
generosity of an old friend. He comes to this noble 
institution with his munificence. It is well directed. 
Here where the youth of the State gather to learn the 
arts of peace and acquire skill for the performance 
of the duties of life, will be felt the sway of a new 
and happy purpose. There is no knowledge more 
practical than that which is pure and inspiring. As- 
tronomy builds as well as adorns. It harmonizes with 
every science. It refreshes all streams of knowledge. 
Every purpose is helped when hitched to a star. Ad 
astra per aspera, is the motto of civilization. I stood 
once in a little chapel of the church of St. Maria, in 
Eome, where Galileo was condemned by the con- 
sistory, and the scene returned in all its vivid reality 
— the old man at bay, pressed by superstition, fighting 
and falling for liberty of thought and the truth of the 
stars. Galileo went down, and Astronomy, the first- 
born of science, was forced into the shadows where 
Art and Eeligion had been driven before. But the 
word was out, the battle-cry of Freedom had been 
sung, and Absolutism trembled and staggered before 
Astronomy. And to-day, when we behold "Old 



Poetry of the Skies. 61 

Glory" adorning the sunlight, let us not look upon 
the stars as a cluster of beauty only, but as teachers 
of that lesson of liberty which first challenged the 
divinity of kings. 

What could be more happily conceived than that 
here, in these beautiful grounds, in the gladsome 
light of science, where the youth come to equip them- 
selves with high purpose and grace their lives with 
the skill of performance, to erect that white dome 
that will stand forever as a monument to liberty and 
a shrine of learning? Education is not more of knowl- 
edge than of spirit, and in true citizenship, courage- 
ous habit and high ideals dwell in unity. Yon ob- 
servatory brings the stars into our lives, the heralds 
of freedom which never vary a hairVbreadth from 
God's law. This is the thought for the education of 
to-day. This is the lesson that bears yonder beautiful 
gift to the State University and the youth of Ohio. 

If I may seem so warm in my words over the gift, 
how can I temper my phrases when I speak of the 
giver? I have known him almost from the days of 
boyhood. I have seen him lay down the saber, with 
which he fought for his country, to take up the shovel 
and work for his living. From the very start, his 
industry, his temperance, his integrity, his clear head, 
his strong heart, his gentle manners, won his way to 
higher and higher responsibilities. His career is a 
gleam of hope to every American boy who is thrown 
on his own resources. I was with him much on the 
threshold of life, and bright is the memory to-day, 
how, to true purpose and honest worth, he added a 
tireless hand and a busy brain. His will went along 



62 Keynotes of Education. 



with his intellect, and he made his life a pattern to 
every brave youth who wants to make his own life a 
success. It does me good to know these things, and 
be able to say that the giver honors the gift. There 
is a great deal in that to those who have faith in the 
logic of events. True, generous, high-resolving Em- 
erson McMillin, we send you our gratitude and love 
to-day, and join with your hope that this gift may 
prove an inspiration and a joy to every youth who 
seeks these halls of learning, and to every man and 
woman who comes here to commune with the good 
Allfather in the silence of the stars. 

When Professor Lord did me the honor to ask me 
to say a word on this occasion, as a friend of the man 
whose kindness we celebrate to-day, I confess, at first, 
I was somewhat disinclined; not because words were 
lacking or the spirit was reticent, but because I knew 
how well Mr. McMillin would prefer to let the gentle 
influences of this benefaction tell their own story in 
the years to come. So I wrote and informed him of 
the handsome duty that had been handed over to 
me, and asked him to write something that I might 
read, hoping thus to relieve you from the burden of 
my own words. His answer disclosed a modesty that 
was charming as a virtue, but as a service to me, for 
this occasion, rather unsatisfactory. 

He said in substance: If there is any appreciation 
of my little effort to advance the instruction and 
comfort of the university, say I value it most sin- 
cerely; and if there is anything of perseverance, in- 
dustry, or true purpose in my life to inspire one boy 
to work out his destiny with faith and courage, that 



Poetry of the Skies. 63 

too may be said, but no more. Let the simple deed 
stand alone. 

So it goes! Kindness unto kindness, thoughtful- 
ness for others, ever since that Ohio boy reached the 
summit of prosperity. What a grand thing it is for 
humanity that such men win their way! Their success 
is the people's good fortune. There he is to-day, at the 
commercial metropolis of the Nation, plunged in the 
midst of great affairs of trade and enterprise, achiev- 
ing victories in the world's field of conflict, to lay the 
fruits of those triumphs at the feet of the people, to 
be used in the building of beautiful ideals and de- 
voted lives. 



CULTURE ON THE FARM. 

1AM a utilitarian. I believe that the usefulness of a 
thing is the test of its value. And so the main 
question with a man is, not what he wants, but what 
he needs. I believe, to draw man away from this 
issue, the devil got into the Garden of Eden and filled 
Farmer Adam's head with a specific sort of nonsense 
that has been disturbing the world ever since. 

But first, as to utility. Well, it is something more 
than cornbread and pickled pork; more than blue 
jeans and linsey-woolsey. Much depends upon one's 
standpoint. If that is high, utility embraces a great 
deal. It takes in, not only what feeds and clothes the 
body, but what feeds and clothes the soul. The more 
a man knows, the more he sees; and the more he sees, 
the greater the utilities multiply, and the needs in- 
crease with the understanding. Thus life becomes an 
arena of promises unfulfilled; or, if realized, to be- 
come so through much straining and contention. 

But let us tackle the subject directly. A farmer 
proposes to send his son to college. By hard dint and 
self-denial, doing without many home comforts, and 
limiting everybody else to the hardest necessities, 
sufficient money is saved and the boy is off. Life on 
the farm has been kept down to the penitentiary basis 
of sleep and toil and hard fare, the only blessing 
coming in the form of a sweet dream that some day, 
in the forward years, the boy would return, wearing 
a silken mustache and quoting Latin to the bewil- 

64 



Culture on the Farm. 65 

derment of the neighboring farmers. It is a great 
change the boy finds at college. No more grubbing, 
no more mauling rails, no oiling the old breeching. 
Life is on an entirely different plane. He has got out 
of the old springless cart, bouncing over the rocks or 
stalling in the mud of the country road, and now he 
sails so serenely in a white-winged yacht around the 
purple headlands. It is an institute of towers and 
steeples. The young company he finds coming from 
the regime of office-desks and Brussels carpets give a 
peculiar twang to existence. But he is not misled by 
these. He knows his duty and dives into his algebra 
with courage and fidelity. He begins to build up 
equations from the unknown, and to make hypothesis 
a servant of truth. He wrestles like a hero with his 
physics and chemistry, and beholds with unerring 
vision how atoms combine to create character and 
force, and how the molecules that make the odor of 
the rose cleave to each other by a law as majestic as 
that which holds Jupiter to the sun. 

He devotes energy to his Latin, and ascends from 
his grammar to Virgil and Ovid, and perceives those 
gentle shades of thought, that sweet fragrance of 
language, that delicate intuition of grace that is a 
part of classical culture, and grows in the appreciation 
of fine and beautiful things. He studies philosophy, 
and works into his life a faith that pertains to duties 
to himself, to society, and to God; discerns fully 
which precedes the other and which is last, and grades 
with sure judgment his own relations to every phase 
of life. He talks with his professor on companionable 
grounds, and they discuss authors and artists, theories 
5 



66 Keynotes of Education. 

and inventions. He has advanced beyond the chromo 
state, and knows the points of a good picture. He 
has a relish for Carlyle and Wordsworth. He has 
begun to discern threads of harmony in the strains 
of Mozart and Wagner. He has several times bor- 
rowed the North American Review from the president 
for a little Sunday recreation. 

And so, toiling, advancing, growing, our hero 
graduates. He has done his duty. He comes forth 
a young man of good habits, wide knowledge, strong 
ambition, and wholesome faith. There is nothing 
apparently lacking. Education, as education goes, 
has done its best for him. And now he goes home — 
back to the old farm — with a fund of rich talents 
through which to work out the mystery of life. He 
meets with a hearty welcome. The folks are proud of 
him. The neighbors come in to admire him. For a 
few days he enjoys the novelty — whiles away the 
leisure bravely — and then undertakes to give the 
cornfield a plowing, or throw back the straw when the 
wheat-threshing occurs. All this is strange to him. 
Eeally, it makes him tired, very tired. It does not 
harmonize with his nature; and so one day he is 
missed, and turns up in an office or a store. Ah, do 
culture and learning unfit one for the farm? If the 
farm is good to support the college, is the college too 
good to exalt the farm? 

Social questions like this are the leading themes. 
More thinking is done over them now than ever. 
Electricity, steam, and science only emphasize them. 
In the great social machine, with its myriad depend- 
encies and relations, there is much arising from the 



Culture on the jFarm. 67 

false notions of things that will be amended by and 
by. Aye, it is rounding in that direction to-day. 
The seers, prophets, and philosophers are seeking 
with renewed energy to establish an equilibrium be- 
tween duty and need, and point out the requirements 
that meet the highest life. The exactions of society 
constitute a false standard; its measure is in dollars 
and cents. Here is a man with a home of plenty, 
whose sons and daughters have books and music, and 
who are taught to use them, and to grace life with 
intelligent thoughts and deeds. How absurd the 
question, What is he worth? as if his worth could be 
measured in tons of pig-iron, or yards of silk, or stock 
in railroads! It knows no standard of this kind. And 
so the best life is to get away from these measures, 
base no calculations on them, erect altars to the beau- 
tiful necessity, as Emerson calls it, and let the soul 
develop along the line of the divine potencies — put 
on what God intended the soul should wear, not what 
the selfishness of trade or politics ordains. 

The farm is the place for this. New theory, you 
say. Yes, to be sure, it is a theory; but progress is 
built on dreams. Imagination is the forerunner of 
invention. What is all this tumult to-day, this 
clangor of opinion and discussion upon questions as, 
Is crime increasing? Is education a failure? Is the 
world growing worse? Is the Church losing ground? 
Is capital sinful? Is poverty a disease? Is insanity 
gaining? It is because of our false standards of life, 
warped and crooked by the demands of society. It 
was tins false standard that inspired "The Republic," 
"Eutopia," "Looking Backward/' and other books in 



68 Keynotes of Education. 

which were constructed forms of government whereby 
worth, and not wealth, was the grace of citizenship, 
and where the happiness and purity of the home was 
the mark of individual success. 

That boy should have stayed on the farm. He 
would have soon adjusted his talents to its demands. 
He would have been able to adorn its independence 
with culture, and make of the two an agency that the 
country seriously needs. We have lots of culture in 
the land, and lots of independence, but they are so 
disjoined that they play against each other. If money 
was the object, probably the city was the place for a 
chance at least. There he could speculate, corner, 
win, break up and set up again, and, may be, make a 
great deal of money, wear a diamond pin, and attract 
friends by giving costly dinners; but he is absolutely 
insignificant in the swirl of trade. He loses his 
significance as an individual. He is a mere straw in 
the flying wind. 

But on the farm, if he has a speck of heroism and 
his culture is what it should be, he would be an indi- 
vidual force for miles around. I know the antago- 
nism between muscle and brain; how one is apt to 
make weary the other. But a due exercise of both is 
in line with the best development. The well-known 
division of the day — eight hours for work, eight hours 
for sleep, and eight hours for rest and study — is suf- 
ficient for a worthy and honorable livelihood. But I 
do not suppose there are many farmers who average 
eight hours a day of work, even including the usual 
pottering around to fix a gate or tie a calf. Eight 
hours, then, for reading, investigating, experimenting, 



Culture on the Farm. 69 

contriving, social duties — why, an educational equip- 
ment as complete as Gladstone's can be maintained 
in that allotment of time. There is no vocation that 
has as much leisure that can be used for mental and 
moral endowment. It is the very place for a lover 
of study. 

But there is a salutary change going on. The sta- 
tistics show that the sizes of farms are decreasing in 
this country, that the average yield per acre grows 
greater, that the value per acre is rising. Machinery is 
taking a great portion of the hard toil off of the shoul- 
ders of the farmers, and driving certain crops to large 
areas, where every job of work is done by a man who 
sits in a spring seat and drives. Agriculture is fast 
being classified into two kinds — machine farming and 
brain farming. The latter applies to small farms. 
It requires thought in the preparation of soil and the 
arrangement of crops to meet the market at the time 
of the best prices. It requires a species of handiwork 
in the propagation of new varieties, the maintenance 
of hot-houses, the trial of improved methods. No 
educated man need find himself lonely in the midst 
of such aptitudes as a fifty or hundred acre farm 
possesses. The appetite of society will not be satisfied 
with half the specialties that his genius can suggest. 

But farming is not my theme. I hold to the 
adequacy of farm-life to sustain the best promise of 
education. There is too much nonsense afloat as to 
the proper arena of manhood. Some place it in the 
rattle-de-bang of railroad operation; some in the 
dreary contentions in courts; some in the putrid fens 
of politics; or out in the turmoil of trade, the dull 



70 Keynotes of Education. 

monotony of banks, or the lazy uncertainty of the 
public service. The idea that life is a battle where 
every fellow has to fight somebody or other has done 
a power of evil in the land. It has distorted the 
visions of many noble youths, and twisted their 
careers out of shape. Away with such notions! True 
life is a quiet, constant force, directed to the accom- 
plishment of things that are needful and helpful. It 
seeks higher inspiration than the temporary triumphs 
of the streets. It is not a mad rush for money. Did 
you ever think to whom the alchemists of old offered 
allegiance when they sought to transmute iron into 
gold? It was Satan himself. To him they offered 
sacrifices, and promised the performance of evil deeds. 
The basis of the story of old Bluebeard is true history, 
when he murdered, at various times, a hundred chil- 
dren to seek the favor of the' devil in his efforts to 
change some baser metal to gold. 

Losing sight of the real needs, in order to meet the 
artificial wants, is akin to this, and it has ruined the 
lives of many a man's children. No vocation offers 
the opportunity to rise above the base clamors of the 
world for money, office, favor, as that of the farmer. 
A decent living is at least secured. He is not tangled 
in the social meshes. He is his own arbiter. 

The non-farming world is often twitted for the 
poetic idea it entertains of farm-life, and the farmer, 
no doubt, often grows weary of the sweet drivel of 
sentiment bestowed upon his vocation by those who 
could not be hired to plow an acre of clay soil if they 
could be assured of fifty bushels of wheat from it. It 
is very romantic in the distance, say they, with its 



Culture on the Farm. 71 

songs of birds, its odor of blossoms, its noble inde- 
pendence and fresh eggs; but as one approaches the 
elysian, with its actual conditions — its hard work, its 
fathomless appetite of pigs and cattle, its scant dol- 
lars, and growing, roughly-clad children, and hard- 
working wife — he returns with renewed affections to 
the gentle measures of the yardstick and the reliable 
routine of wages. 

Must this distant view, which lends enchantment, 
resolve itself into a hard and cruel reality as one ap- 
proaches the scene? Is there no solvent that will 
bring into sweet union the poetry and the fact? 
Could the boy who graduated take hold in no way 
that could minister unto his inclinations and make 
him feel that the wisdom of his books and the energy 
of his mental equipment had reached a field for their 
genial exercise and application? "Well, what do you 
say? No? Why, then? Because farming does not 
result in fortunes, bank-stock, money, fashionable 
living, and social excitement. That is the logic that 
the world goes by. It rules, no doubt. 

I do not believe in it, altogether. We need men to 
build railroads, exchange goods, manufacture machin- 
ery, preach the gospel, etc.; but we want men, far 
more, who preserve their individuality by a closer 
contact with God and a less dependence upon man. 
We need men who live lives, not as pieces of machin- 
ery, cogged and keyed and pinioned to other pieces, 
and running by somebody else's steam, darting 
through grooves and whirling on cranks. In this 
machine-life the best of a man is lost — lost to himself, 
to his family, to the world. His opinions gyrate with 



72 Keynotes of Education. 

him, and his education is squeezed down to fit the hole 
he occupies. His culture runs into form and his 
wisdom into repartee. 

So it was with our hero. He should have stayed 
on the farm. He should have consulted his needs and 
not his wants, and accepted the opportunity to expand 
his soul under the inspiration of the culture which 
his father's sweat had secured for him. He would 
have found a place for his science there, in what form 
his tastes inclined to. His are the hills, the fields, the 
rocks, the trees — just what true culture loves. The 
whole concave of the skies bends over him. The 
world is wide to him, and it challenges him at every 
step. His nights are his. No simpering parties, no 
committees, no clamoring societies to drag him from 
wife and children. A man immersed in the activities 
of city life half neglects his children. But on a farm 
there is the opportunity of actual companionship. 
Now, if culture presides, and the right sort of books 
are provided (and there need not be many of these), 
that companionship will be a golden charm, healthful 
and elevating to all within its influence. 

Yes, everything is on tiptoe to answer the signals 
of the princely soul. There is botany, zoology, chem- 
istry, mineralogy, meteorology, natural philosophy, 
and all the glowing curriculum of his college spread 
in ample pages before him and illustrated by the 
Divine Artist himself, all ready to be transposed into 
life and character — ready to be utilized for changing 
the acute angles of thought and aspiration into up- 
ward spirals that have no ending, because it is asso- 
ciating with the divine nature of things. 



Ctdture on the Farm. 73 

But the pork and potatoes — where are they to 
come from? The question belongs to the problem. 
Culture is frequently hungry. But I have been as- 
suming that there was something else needed besides 
pork and potatoes — that our love and devotion should 
not be wholly spent on stomachs and cold feet. If 
there is no other question, then indeed have I been 
threshing straw? But I look upon the farmer as 
occupying a different relation to the world — not only 
that of feeder, but its best thinker, its surest and 
safest citizen. What he may lose in money he will 
gain in manhood. He may have no particular charac- 
ter at the bank; but that which holds at home will do 
the community higher service, and will bestow upon 
his children nobler patrimonies. 

But, mind you, I do not admit that impecuniosity 
is the result of education in this case, or that it comes 
to him who, rising from a serfdom to corn and hogs, 
spends happy leisures in avenues of culture. Why, it 
is the very purpose of education to invest men with 
resources, to give them power, to make them their 
own masters; and it would lift agriculture out of the 
swamp it is in — the three-dollars an acre profit that 
hangs to it like a millstone in the well-known rotation 
of cereals — to the higher planes of economy, which, 
an author as old Xenophon says, is not saving, but 
only management. 

And here is the great appetite of society, divided 
up into infinitesimal and innocent desires, each 
reaching out for its own. Which will you serve? 
Find the right one, and it will treat you tenderly. 
It will moderate your toil and sweeten your life. 'T is 



74 Keynotes of Education. 

the province of brains to get ont of the ruts; to 
discover something for which a special demand exists, 
and supply it. It pays better, and lightens labor. 
The corn-crop of this year was so big that it did n't 
pay the expense of raising; so with oats, and nearly 
so with wheat; yet I read in the papers of a farmer in 
another State who is making $1,500 from nine acres 
by selling dried raspberries; and I have no doubt he 
sits in the shade at noonday reading Virgil or inspect- 
ing, with a thousand-power microscope, the jawbone 
of a weevil. 

And so my deliberate judgment is, that the young 
man should have stayed upon the farm and bestowed 
the gifts of the college upon the noblest of vocations. 
With a brave heart and a high purpose he would have 
soon found that the exactions of the soil were tem- 
pered to the highest needs of his nature, and that the 
blessings of God, all about him, if truly recognized, 
would add to the dignity and luster of the mind. As 
I said, the popular standards of success would have 
to be modified, but that is the highest office of cul- 
ture. 'T is the duty of learning to pull down idols. 
And so, when a boy, fresh from his literature and 
science, looks in the soil for a response to his highest 
longings, he will be sure to find it; for God has placed 
there whatever Virtue and Honor require. 



THE ART OF LIFE. 

AET is the expression of the soul. It may speak 
•**• in form, as in sculpture ; in color, as in painting ; 
in tone, as in music; in phrase, as in poetry; but there 
is something that is greater than any of these, or 
rather a combination of all of them; something that 
embodies the grace of form, the beauty of tint, the 
harmony of tone, and the rhythm of phrase, and this 
is the art of doing or living. 

For this the soul is not restricted to the chisel, 
the brush, the tongue, or the pen; it is held to no 
tool or implement; it is the universe speaking in 
boundless wealth, in grandeur, in truth, in love, in 
humility; it is the heavens bending over the soul, the 
stars gathering to sing it anthems, the thunder salut- 
ing it with praise, the woods waving a million banners 
in its honor; the rolling seasons, the throbbing ocean, 
the sinking sun, the purple peaks, all crowding about 
to touch the soul with majesty and power, and trans- 
mute these into deeds of duty and grace. The ex- 
tent of this reaction, in the soul, of the Divine Spirit 
projected in all that is about us, marks the height of 
our education and determines the quality of the art of 
life. 

In his essay on Inspiration, Emerson speaks of the 
metamorphosis of natural into spiritual facts, but 
my purpose to-night is to carry the thought farther, 
and to include the change of the spiritual fact back 
to the natural again. Goethe somewhere says, "Art 

75 



76 Keynotes of Education. 

rests upon a kind of religious sense." And here it 
is — God's meaning borne within, by sense retouched 
and remodeled into some form of grace or beauty. 
And this is the Alpha and Omega of culture. 

Art is education in action, and it is the only view 
of education that is worth the pressure of anxiety. 
If we absorb God's thoughts, that come to us through 
divine example and the glorious pages of nature, in 
intuition and inspiration, and fail to let them loose 
again in some form of deed or service, then we may 
prepare ourselves for the doom of the unfaithful 
steward who, accepting the talent, kept it wrapped 
up in a napkin. The concretion of the truth and 
ideality into experience is the summit of education; 
it is that for which education itself is. It is the very 
logic of wisdom. 

We have been so satisfied with the science of life, 
which is knowledge, that we have quite neglected the 
art of life, which is conduct. When we acquire 
knowledge and understanding, and permit them to lie 
in the mind like a sweet incense, or something to 
fondle and dally in our dreams, but neglect to see 
that they break forth into sacrifice, courtesy, candor, 
justice, work, and purpose, we rob our education of 
nine-tenths of its value, especially if, as Matthew 
Arnold says, conduct is nine-tenths of a man's life. 

We can not ignore God's purpose in education. 
Truth has a mission greater than a mere solace. It is 
vitalized with divine decree, as the ray of light which 
the leaf transforms into the glowing hearth and the 
joy of home. Where is this link that unites learning 
with life; that makes the scholar a champion; that 



The Art of Life. 77 

adorns the street, the home, the church, the legisla- 
ture, with the sacrifices and heroisms of truth; that 
writes over every school-door, as over every church 
altar, "Faith without works is dead?" 

The fault of our education is the failure to suit 
the action to the word. As Plutarch said of the 
Athenian youth, we know better than we do. The 
blossom dwindles in the fruit. The fact is left with- 
out a deed; the idea without a purpose; the inspira- 
tion without a flight. Education is the evolution of 
knowledge into experience. The quality of this evo- 
lution depends upon the amount of God's Spirit we 
take in with the fact. All true knowledge is aglow 
with divine energy. In the earth, in the skies, and 
amid all human experiences, God has written lessons 
of truth, and every line shines with the Eternal 
Spirit. 

The very essence of creation is in the food which 
the body changes into fiber and strength, and the 
infinite spirit of love and truth is in the knowledge 
that the soul transforms into praise, sacrifice, and 
work. Every bush is a burning bush, and every 
star hangs over Bethlehem. We look upon the work 
of some master, and feel the divine impulse that 
changed the stone and canvas into a vision of grace, 
of splendor, of power. What delicate touch of fancy 
did Praxiteles put into the Faun! When one gazes 
on the statue of Moses he is awakened by Angelo's 
massive genius, and not by the presence of the Law- 
giver. You see the Transfiguration, and you know, 
in the sweet face of Christ, KaphaePs beautiful soul 
is transfigured, and not Christ himself. Stand in the 



78 Keynotes of Education. 

columned splendor of the Parthenon, and yon feel the 
shade of Phidias filling the silence of the nohle ruin. 
Back of the gift stands the giver. Arching the deed 
is the doer. 

If the soul is touched by the triumphs of human 
genius; if it is turned skyward by one loving hand in 
the service of truth and reverence, why may it not 
walk, inspired and ecstatic, through the gallery of 
God's art, that extends beyond the stars and outlies 
the dimmest horizon, and is packed everywhere with 
grace and loveliness, with majesty and power, where 
chaos is order, and ruin is resurrection? Once I 
heard a sermon within a stone's-throw of Calvary, on 
the text, "What think ye of Christ?" It was as deep 
and tender as a mother's voice when the world has 
turned against one. It was very, very near. As I 
came out of the Damascus gate, and looked up at the 
stars, and away out yonder at the Judean summits, 
and heard the soft voice of the night sweep by, I felt 
that the Infinite Presence was as near as ever, and 
that love, beauty, and power pressed about as be- 
seechingly as on the day of the great sacrifice. 

Ah, our glaring misfortune is, we do not see God 
in the world! I fear we are all steeped deeper in 
atheism than we think. When the Allfather hangs 
a leaf, or paints a flower, or spreads a cloud, or lights 
a star, or inspires a noble deed, or tempts a sacrifice, 
we turn our backs and say, "0, that's nothing!" 
We would not treat Phidias, Titian, Canova, or Sir 
Christopher Wren that way. We would catch the 
spirit of their great victories and try to make it ani- 
mate our own lives. We accept their construction of 



The Art of Life. 79 

the inner meaning of truth, and seek to assimilate it 
into faith and purpose. And herein are the dynamics 
of education — the spiritual force back of and running 
through knowledge, and converting it into tendency, 
character, work. We are so apt to gaze at the atom, 
and lose ourselves in the mystery of electric, chemic, 
and kinetic forces, that we lose sight of the Eternal 
Wisdom that compresses a universe into a grain of 
sand and scatters the dust of worlds across the skies; 
that holds in harmony the beating of a cell and the 
whorl of a nebula. 

This material age clings close to the calculus, the 
Greek verb, and the mere nomenclature. It puts the 
intellect to work upon every potency and possibility 
of matter. Men run to and fro and knowledge is 
increased. 0, this majestic age of intelligence! It 
has carried its banners of triumph through the natural 
world to the giddy point where the divisible atom 
seems to merge into spirit, and where the last potency 
of matter melts into the breath of the Infinite. In- 
tellect has been brave and tireless, and challenges the 
very angels in the fulfillment of duty. It has 
brought us up to the very limit of thinking, to the 
edge where induction ceases, where the syllogism loses 
its premise, to the line toward Avhieh hope, faith, 
imagination, and the inmost longing of the soul 
beckon us onward. Ah, if the lens, the crucible, the 
acid, in their pursuit of matter, find in its utmost 
force and dimension the eternal harmonies as clear 
and sweet as the song of the angels in the morning 
of the world, must we then stop and shut our ears and 
our hearts to the divine melodies that break just be- 



80 Keynotes of Education. 

yond? "Wo unto him that saith to the wood, 
Awake; to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach! Be- 
hold, it is laid over with gold and silver, and there 
is no breath at all in the midst of it." 

My thought is, that the spiritual force of knowl- 
edge, as well as the material force, should inspire the 
mind, should build beautiful ideals there, and direct 
life and conduct into God's purpose as shown in the 
beauty, the grace, the grandeur, the harmony of the 
world. The mere physical fact in chemical affinity, 
in spectrum analysis, in the laminations of a rock, in 
the song of a locust, is not important. Only in their 
harmony, in their delicate pose and balance, their 
nice adaptations, their agency in some great end, and 
the deep mystery of their energies, where God's 
thought dwells, their value lies. 

Back of the driving of a nail, the making of a fire, 
the laying of a brick, spirit thrills and purpose runs. 
Is it any the less in the swinging of an atom, the 
soaring of a comet, the white flash of a snowflake, or 
the sunset glowing on a maple-leaf? The object in 
directing the intellect toward the divine meaning in 
all things is the reflex influence it will have upon life 
and conduct. There is surely an influence in all 
God's ideals — in all his expressions of love, of beauty, 
of sublimity — that will bless and ennoble life. The 
eternal verities that are stored in the soul break into 
deed by the contemplation of God's habit of thought 
and method of work. Here is the basis of all ethics, 
of all art, of all education. 

It is not the things, but how we see them, that 
affect us. If we see only the matter, the effect is ma- 



The Art of Life. 81 

terial; if we discern the spirit, the effect is spiritual. 
At the outset we must dream and idealize and im- 
agine, and let the faith of the soul reach out for beauty 
and wisdom. The heart should go with the intellect, 
so that when one sees beauty, the other may love it; 
when one discerns good, the other may absorb it. So 
knowledge and wisdom go hand in hand, and thus to 
know is to be. 

Art and religion keep together, and the purer the 
religion the nobler the art. True art is the projec- 
tion of divine ideals. It is the discernment of the 
spiritual transformed into color and form, into phrase 
and tone. It is not reproduction, it is interpretation. 
It is seeing a cliff, a winding stream, a bed of lilies, 
a flash of a meteor, a cup of water, with that large, 
sweet sense which discerns a wise and loving meaning, 
and embodying that meaning in art. Suppose, instead 
of working it out of the marble, or spreading it on a 
canvas, or setting it afloat in an anthem, we convert 
it into conduct and form our lives from it. Is it not 
possible that one may be so impressed by the eternal 
wisdom which dwells in all things, that he will idealize 
life into a harmony where only courage, candor, cour- 
tesy, duty, and kindness can abide? These are the 
fruits of the spirit. The virtues and amenities of life 
are the expression of nature's laws applied to human 
conduct. Every phase of the physical world affects 
our thought and purpose. This we know is true in a 
large sense, for the racial and national differences are 
thus accounted for; but the fact is true in a personal 
sense. 

That beautiful tree you sit under, that spring you 
6 



82 Keynotes of Education. 

visit, that hillside you climb, that bush of red berries, 
that big white cloud, that sparkling constellation ris- 
ing yonder, each has a tint, or tone, or gleam that 
plays with your moods, and tempts your fancies, 
until you come out of your down-street life and your 
club and your politics, touched by the jocund op- 
timism of nature, and swayed by a deeper and diviner 
conception of life. Virtuous action, as Sir Philip 
Sidney remarked, is the end of all earthly learning. 
But that learning will miss its achievement if it has 
not a moral bias to give it direction. And whence 
comes this moral bias? From the Bible? 0, there 
are never-failing fountains indeed! But men get 
their knowledge from the world, by study, by observa- 
tion, by experience in shop, in market, in field, where 
material tendencies, almost resistless, rush and toss 
and wrangle, and carry humanity away from God. 

And must it be so? Is God to be driven to the 
Bible, to the splendor of the sunrise, and the 
freighted silence of the forest? Bight there is the 
fault of our civilization. We see God's glory in the 
heavens, his power in the storm, his love in the 
flowers and the children; and yet right there in the 
market-place is his justice enthroned, and we go 
heedless by. There is not a contract to which he is 
not the third party. There is not a house built but 
the architect consults him. There is not a product 
turned out but he gives it shape, and size, and 
weight. There is not a pound or yard sold but he 
sees to the measure. There is not word spoken but 
he notes the last vibration of it. There is not a deed 
done that he does not watch the result in the next 
year or the next century. 



The Art of Life. 83 

This is not Transcendentalism, not a particle more 
than the Beatitudes are. It is life's sternest axiom. 
Action and reaction are equal, or water seeks its own 
level, is not more manifest. The divine law that 
gathers the star-dust into solar systems, or marshals 
the infusoria in a drop of water, pervades every nook 
and crevice of human action. And the law is en- 
forced ever, ever; for back of it is the Omnipotent 
Executive. This is not theology or religion. It is 
education. The value of truth lies in its ethical 
basis. True art rests there also. Their composite 
is conduct, which is the end of education. It is prac- 
tical atheism to ignore the doctrine; and that it is 
ignored is the explanation of this materialistic and 
pessimistic age. It is a sad comment on our schools 
and colleges that the poisonous drama, the prurient 
novels, the licentious pictures, the empty gabble of 
society, the mad hunger for vain entertainment, 
should, to so sad an extent, constitute the inclination 
and purpose of mankind. 

To combat that tendency, which is darker than I 
dare describe, the educational agencies must teach 
the art of life, inspired by a conception of the spir- 
itual side of truth. The duty of measuring every deed 
by a moral principle must be taught more persistently 
than the definitions, the processes, the theorems 
of the text-books. That is the road to safety, to pu- 
rit} T , to noble endeavor, and to a true and graceful life. 
I know the conditions of the problem, how weak 
human nature hankers for the material, and how 
animalism parades its luxuries to the senses; but this 
very fact makes the duty of marking a new path more 
commanding. Happily the task grows lighter as it 



84: Keynotes of Education. 

develops, for the true light comes like a benediction 
to strengthen and bless the soul. 

There is something wrong with our education that 
creates a taste for the sort of reading that prevails, 
for the kind of entertainment we seek, for the effort 
at mere material pleasure that we make, for the glib 
and insincere conversation, for our crude and angular 
manners, for our listless and wayward thinking, 
and for our persistent and incoherent humor. We 
are so inclined to make life a phantom, fringed 
with yellow, dancing and beckoning along the poison- 
ous vines of a morass. But life is serious, solemn; 
born of a hope that truth alone supports, and des- 
tined for an immortality formed by the harmony of 
a soul with the divine energies of the universe. Who- 
ever is out of tune with these is uneducated. 
Whoever is not impressed by a sense of the wisdom, 
the justice, the beauty of all that is about him is un- 
educated. One can not think of that pervading In- 
telligence as discordant, insincere, impure, deceitful, 
cowardly, or unkind. 

There is somewhat in every flower, every bowered 
hillside, every roaring cascade, every stately cliff, 
every snowy landscape, every generous deed and silent 
sacrifice — somewhat, I say, if we inquire within — to 
deck the heart with an impulse to reproduce, in life, 
the secret of their loveliness and power. 

Let a teacher go from the street-corner or loaf- 
ing-place down-town, with the odor of gutter and 
street upon him, and the miasma of the usual gabble 
of society, politics, and personal experience tinctur- 
ing his soul, and make his personal presence before 



The Art of Life. 85 

his pupils an expression of these influences, as he 
must needs do, how surely, though unseen, the poison 
of scandal, envy, impurity, injustice, and unkind- 
ness works its way into the young blood of the 
school! He is molding conduct with a master 
hand, but a conduct that has little trace of God in 
it. He is developing low ideas and low purposes to 
figure in future trade, society, and politics. How 
that schools drags; how it ought to drag! 

But let a teacher go to the school from some fair 
headland, amid Avhich God's love abounds in bird, 
in bush, in trickling brook, in sailing shadow, in 
grand old trees and green meadows stretching far 
away; let him take deep inspirations of the Divine 
Spirit which touches everything with love and grace; 
and then, with a mind full of ideals of duty, of pur- 
pose, of work, of conduct, go into the presence of 
that school. The horizons widen, the blue sides 
bend down, and that room is brightened by visions 
of heroic duty and high endeavor. It is a great 
difference what finger strikes the chord. 

I like, sometimes, to think of the physics of 
theosophy, which illustrate, if they do not explain, 
the mode of psychical force. The all-pervading 
spirit incumbering the soul, sets afloat the vibrations 
of thought and feeling, winch fill the ether with an 
influence, good or bad, according to the will and ten- 
dency of the person. Then thought breaks into its 
appropriate form, and emotion takes on some mode 
of energy. 

So marked are these vibrations, so visibly do they 
disturb the ether, that the faint tracery of their ac- 



86 Keynotes of Education. 



tion affects the delicate chemistry of the photog- 
rapher's plate, and they express themselves in veri- 
table pictures of thought and sentiment. 

If a sudden fit of anger is photographed, it shows 
itself as a bomb bursting with fiery smoke and flame; 
love is revealed as a climbing vine, whose tendrils 
reach out into the sweet air and break into bloom; 
hate is a long, gleaming blade, thrust out from the 
soul against the heart of humanity; the song of 
Home, Sweet Home sets forth a flood of vibrations 
that arrange themselves into the form of a cozy cot- 
tage, with a porch of vines, and beds of flowers, and 
trees about. 

If these phenomena are not sufficiently substan- 
tial in fact to find a place in our books of knowledge, 
still they are not stranger than every-day facts of 
experience, where the tints, the moods, the tenor of 
our thoughts and fancies make their appropriate ex- 
pression, not in pictures merely, that fade and are 
forgotten, but in deeds and conduct, which will live 
in the lives of others when oblivion has gathered to 
itself all memories of our own. 

Should you ask me what form of education I would 
prescribe, to convert God's meaning in tree, and ax- 
iom, and sacrifice, into purpose and conduct, I would 
answer Froebelism from the cradle to the grave, from 
the child with his first strips of colored paper to the 
senior with his philosophical disquisition, on to the 
bacteriologist seeking new forms of life, to the as- 
tronomer sweeping the skies for new worlds, made 
and unmade. 

It is a blending of the thoughts, the emotions, 



The Art of Life. 87 

and the forces of the muscles on their errands of the 
will. We should know that imagination, ideality, 
fancy, inspiration, are just as important facts as 
England, oxygen, money, or the Eevolutionary War. 
They are the pioneers of progress. Imagination has 
made nearly all the inventions and discoveries. 
Ideality has painted the great pictures and chiseled 
the great statues. 

These sentiments transform knowledge into 
achievement, and, finally, into character. Down deep 
in the soul of the child lie the beauty and harmony 
of the universe, like unborn forests in an acorn-cup, 
and these are evolved by the influence of proper 
association upon the three powers of the soul; and 
doing, acting, working along with that evolution, is 
what finally unfolds that beauty and harmony into 
conduct. 

How high I place the teacher! He works with 
God; he is an agent of divine purpose. Here is a 
little seed, so big. It is put in the ground, tended 
and cared for, and after a while is a flaming orchard, 
and wagon-loads of comfort and gladness are hauled 
home. Who folded all that happiness in that 
little wrapper? It was simply an atom of divine 
energy placed in a brown husk. God's touch makes 
a universe of potency. But it is a creature, after all, 
and comes with a condition — that it will not be 
thrown to the wayside, or on the rock, or where 
thorns choke, or the fowls feast, but in that gentle 
harmony of things amid which God's will works. 
In the apple-seed was the brooding silence of Ins 
loving purpose. 



88 Keynotes of Education. 

And so the unfolding of the divine potency, re- 
posed in the soul of the child, presents the real 
problem of education. It is fatal to forget the sub- 
lime beginning. A florist takes up a little slip or 
twig of a rose; scrutinizes it closely before he plants 
it. Why? To see if God's purpose yet resides in 
it. He puts it in the soft, sweet ground. To-morrow 
there is a garden of bloom, and an air full of fra- 
grance. Let us ever and ever go back to the divine 
origin and purpose, and ask ourselves if the treat- 
ment of the child's soul is God's way of unfolding, 
and if the universal spirit, which gives its grace and 
strength to flower and leaf and singing brook, to 
courtesy and sacrifice and courageous deed, is invited 
to inspire and uplift duty, and shed a radiance on 
the paths of life. 

The potency of the rose for color, or the bird for 
song, or the water for motion, is not greater than the 
human soul for love, purity, sacrifice, justice. If 
humanity were near as faithful as the flower, the 
rock, or the rainbow in expressing God's idea, the 
millennium would be here now. We suppress this 
potency because of fashion, or fear, or sweet com- 
placency, which is a mixture of ignorance and 
cowardice. We permit society, with its various 
phases of party, of dance, of cards, of novel-reading, 
of cheap talk, to neutralize the gladsome influence 
of cliff, of lily, of oriole, and of sunrise. We some- 
how seem to feel that the commonplace of life is no 
place for divine reality. We turn traitors to our 
children by making imperial the fads and flurries of 
the moment, and driving their little thoughts and 
purposes into the channels of emptiness and vanity. 



The Art of Life. 89 

My friends, I know the obstacles of the problem; 
how difficult it is to turn this little taste, this desire, 
this volition, out of the drift of circumstances, away 
from materialistic domination, to seek at some modest 
altar of truth and purity a benediction of Infinite 
Love. It is quite impossible for restricted visions 
to see any connection between this humble sacrifice 
and life's clamoring utilities. The kindergarten is a 
device to establish this connection, not by process 
of induction or deduction, or any form of didactics, 
but by that genial training into habit which recog- 
nizes the sway of a divine force in all things beau- 
tiful, pure, just, and lovely. 

It is taking purity from the lily, grace from the 
rainbow, work from the bee, friendship from even- 
tide, purpose from the dawn, and developing from 
them and all their relations of form, color, and use, 
the habits of candor, courtesy, kindness, self-denial, 
and high endeavor, and thus raising life to the plane 
of God's good will. It is not knowledge or doctrine 
that is sought, but character and tendency. It is 
taking the child at the most tender and impression- 
able age, when the nerve, the muscle, and the brain 
begin to project their energies into conduct, and di- 
rect this evolution, not according to the whims, the 
frailties, and the errors of a perverse and selfish 
society. 

Every home should be a kindergarten, and every 
mother a teacher. It is not necessary that she should 
know the metaphysics of Schelling or the occupa- 
tions of Froebel; but she should hold to the spirit 
of that holy philosophy which regards a true life 
as a part of the harmony which marks God's sway 



90 Keynotes of Education. 



on earth; and every little act, word, and thought, as 
a part of that harmony, or of the discord that breaks 
in upon it. 

Truth is conformity to the divine sway, and the 
benign and loving acceptance of the duty it evokes. 
It is looking at things as they go by with calm eyes 
and a trustful heart, knowing that the sun will rise 
and set, the waters run, the flowers bloom, love en- 
dures, self-denial exalts, and faith gilds with hope 
every summit of the soul. 

Poverty, sickness, failure, are small things to 
think about, if we live in harmony with the simple 
laws of life, the very laws that evolved creation, that 
knit the green leaf with the needles of the sunbeam, 
and wove the blue skies with stars. 

It is this mastery over the material and its vicis- 
situdes of impatience, bitterness, disappointment, ill- 
will, passion, and hasty thought and word, that is 
the first equipment of the true mother teacher, and 
every subservience to the opposing influence is treach- 
ery to the child and to God. 

The wretehedest fault of ignorance is ignoring 
little things. Atoms make the world, and the way 
one looks at an atom makes life. Not more surely 
does this molecule braid the galaxy across the skies 
than this little act, this little word, fills the chapters 
of human history. 

The teacher who knows this greatest of all facts 
in education, can alone be trusted. If he thinks an- 
ger, prejudice, injustice, deceit, unkindness, or any 
vice of hand or mind will run itself out, or that the 
contingencies of to-morrow will bury it under the 



The Art of Life. 91 

green sod of God's pity and forgetfulness, he is not 
fit to be trusted with the lovely soul of a child. 

Every falsehood hurts the mind. Every deceit 
blights the judgment. Every sneer hardens the 
heart. Every wild threat lowers the purpose. It 
is an awful thing to trifle with the tender suscepti- 
bilities of a child. And yet, how readily we go at it! 
We handle the delicate energy as if it were a clod. 
"We jostle the trembling equilibrium of innocence 
and frailty until it crumbles into grief and dread. 
We plant our own ill-natures, our own foibles, our own 
petulance, our own faithlessness, our own meanness, 
in the heart of every child we fail to reach with love 
and thoughtful duty. 

We forget these things. We think we can sow 
rank seeds and grow flowers of beauty and fragrance. 
God never did as much. Ever}* 1 hateful threat, every 
abusive taunt, every low fact, every insincere word, 
every make-believe piety, every scandal at table, 
every ill-natured domestic, every miserable show and 
book of tarnished fiction, taints the white soul of the 
child, and drags it toward the lower levels of life. 

Ah, my friends, training a child is no whimsical 
duty! It is not the function of mean spirits. We 
can not fill all our ideals with realization. This 
earth was not built for angels. But it was made for 
true, honest, sincere, God-fearing men and women, 
whose loftiest mission is to do the best they can by 
living brave, calm, sincere, thoughtful, self-respect- 
ing lives themselves, to establish the divine pur- 
pose. 

In God's name, the child demands the best life 



92 Keynotes of Education. 



we can give it, and the bravest defense we can throw 
aronnd it; and parent or teacher who knuckles to 
the world, and consents that the whims ajid follies 
of the age shall drive hirn from his loving authority 
is a traitor to the child and a reprobate before God. 

Education is the creation of tendencies. It gives 
the soul direction and purpose. Whither is more 
important than what? A man's head may be full of 
learning as an egg is of meat, and yet he be as cold, 
fixed, and inert as the statue of Cato. He lacks a 
trend. A boy toils through school, and comes out 
with an ability to read Horace, demonstrate a prob- 
lem in geometry, or conduct a chemical analysis. If 
that is all, it is a poor reward for so much labor; no 
greater than harnessing a horse, grafting a bud, or 
making a loaf of bread. If these studies do not 
arouse enthusiasm, widen endeavor, build up pur- 
pose, and excite self-reliance, they have been per- 
verted and abused. When a boy steps from the 
school-room into life, and stands and waits until 
Eockafellar or Carnegie comes along to offer him a 
job, he has missed the essential part of an education. 
The soul elements have been overlooked. Duty, 
faith, courage, originality, inspiration, ambition, 
have been ignored, and the boy is made to grope his 
way amid the chances of the world, which has little 
need for parsing, algebra, or Latin. What the world 
needs is manhood and womanhood; sturdy, aggres- 
sive, high-resolving manhood and womanhood, that 
sutler the hunger and thirst of the moment for the 
triumph that God gives by and by. 

Are these things in the text-books? yes, just 



The Art of Life. 93 

as much as religion is in the Bible. It depends upon 
how Ave look at it. If we look at anything with an 
eye of flesh, and refuse to give scope to the spiritual 
vision, on the plane of sense we live and eat and die. 
There is enough in every text-book to make an arch- 
angel, if we read between the lines, where God's 
meaning dwells. It seems almost that education was 
trying to keep the soul from working over into 
prayer, inspiration, and resolve, the percepts that 
come up through the senses. Many teachers attempt 
to construct character as they would make soap, by 
a simple combination of trifling substances. There 
is a slight endeavor to link learning with destiny and 
duty, and yet for these education exists. 

Right here comes the practical point. We know 
the gap, but how to fill it is the problem. We can not 
lay the moral duty on the home or the Church. 
Truth is not divided up into bins like a grocery. 
It is all one, and the teacher is its prophet; and if 
he is not furnished with schedules and methods and 
prescribed lines of effort, he must make his own; he 
must write his own ritual with which to develop 
God's plan. The pupil sees the world through the 
teacher's eyes; he hears it with the teacher's ears; he 
hopes and desires and yearns through the teacher's 
spirit. Ah, if the teacher fails to see the heavenly 
visions; if he does not catch the celestial melodies; 
if his soul fails to build beautiful mansions in which 
love and duty may dwell, over the child's fate a 
shadow falls. 

We can not trust the home. Education occupies 
higher altitudes to-day, because social, civic, and re- 



94 Keynotes of Education. 

ligious duty demands a loftier and purer service. 
We can not escape responsibility by finding fault. 
Really, the fault complained of is one of the strong 
reasons for the existence of the school. We want to 
make the future home of the unclean, stupid, in- 
solent boy who comes to school, better than the home 
he was raised in. This is the main object of the com- 
mon school. Some day we may have a curriculum 
that will strike closer to his nature, and transform 
his life into aims that call forth the exercise of his 
divine energies, and thus we build fairer homes. 

You may call this dreaming. Well, every great 
achievement is born of a dream. What discovery 
or invention that was not first painted by the fancy? 
Was not America the dream of Columbus? Was not 
Neptune the dream of Leverrier? Was not the tele- 
graph the dream of Morse? Thought outruns deed. 
It is the arbiter of new conditions. What the young 
and poetic youth dreams to-day, said Phillips, is to- 
morrow public opinion, and the next day the char- 
ter of nations. 

To think that education is a little arithmetic to 
sell potatoes with, a little spelling to write a letter 
with, a little grammar to talk to the preacher with — 
all the mere tackle of a fisherman — is utterly false to 
the conception of the soul's march to duty, to reality, 
to God. We miss the real utility of things by narrow- 
ing life to hand-to-mouth drudgery, as if to adorn 
and uplift the soul with fancies, ideals, and the inner 
meaning of things were less useful in Heaven's great 
purpose than sowing turnips and making out bills. 
True life is not so cribbed. It is angelic. It looks 
upon everything that is beautiful, pure, and good — 



The Art of Life. 95 

every gentle influence in the field of nature and the 
life of man; every habit of the Infinite Hand in 
blossom, cliff, sunset, and whirling star — as of the 
highest utility, because they kindle love, duty, and 
high purpose. In that direction our educational ef- 
fort should run, and our hearts should pioneer the 
way, even before the road is built. 

Pardon me if I seem overzealous in pressing the 
idea, over and over again, that true education is get- 
ting nearer to God's thought, and acting in harmony 
with it. We may not reach it; we may not come 
very near it; but everv minute of school life should be 
a struggle toward it All truth is divine, and the 
highest end of study is to show the relation of the 
bare fact to something higher. The difference be- 
tween a man and a brute is the ability to discern 
this relation; and that, too, is the measure of duty. 
The arithmetic, the grammar, the geography, glow 
with ideals and beautiful missions, if we rise high 
enough on the headlands to get a view of the king- 
dom. The mathematical equation, the etymology 
of a sentence, the climatic conditions of a place, the 
purity of a thought, the courtesy of personal contact, 
are all the same, and constitute an eternal verity as 
sweetly and lovingly as a Beatitude. You bring the 
magnetic wires closer and closer together, until 
finally there is a spark and a shout, the circuit is 
joined, and the earth is warmed. So we bring the 
little fact, the little knowledge, closer and closer to 
the divine energy, until, finally, there is an inspira- 
tion and a song of triumph, and your hand is on the 
great white throne itself. 

The aim, then, of education is to fill the mind 



96 Keynotes of Education. 

with beautiful ideals, and convert them into conduct. 
Education is not an intellectual conception; it is a 
practical fact. It is transforming God's meaning 
into experience. 

That rosebush is the efflorescence of a principle 
that is as rare and delicate as the memory of a dream. 
That grand old tree is the unfolding of an idea, so 
tender and so true, that heaven itself is built upon 
it. That heroic soul which stood like a rock against 
a brutal error, caught its courage from the song 
of a bird or the flight of a snowflake. That gentle 
spirit which went down into the caverns of gloom, 
and placed her soft hand upon the brow of pain, 
was taught her mission of mercy by the sweet influ- 
ence of the Pleiades. 

There is no glimpse of heaven that finds not a 
response in life, if our education moves itself aright. 
In the material world we are mighty in transfor- 
mation. We change plants into bread, rags into books, 
a patch of wood into homes, ugly clods into a train 
of cars, and Niagara into the light of a city and a 
thousand whirling wheels. Such are some of the 
fruits of education. Ah, if it could have kept even 
pace in the spiritual world, and as nobly transposed 
God's love into kindness, his justice into candor, his 
beauty into courtesy, his strength into courage, his 
truth into inspiration, and all the divine attributes 
into a loving service of humanity! 

Education is positive, not negative. The man 
who sits in his library and luxuriates amid his classics 
and philosophies, and does not carry their gladsome 
and vitalizing influence into the street, the church, 



The Art of Life. 97 

society, and politics, is not an educated man; he is 
an intellectual miser. He gathers knowledge like a 
miser does gold, from a base worship of it. 

Gold is not riches; and an encyclopedia is not 
an education. It is a store of facts, like Pompeii, 
the Catacombs of Eome, and the tomb of Ptah; 
still to be transmuted into life, under appropriate 
environment, as the wheat in the hands of the mum- 
mies was turned into bread. 

An educated man is he who absorbs the meaning 
and spiritual energy of God's expression in the uni- 
verse, and, like an honest man, paying him back 
again in sincere and dutiful service to humanity. 
That is the art of life. It is exemplifying the truth 
by conduct, and thereby making life more beautiful, 
and bringing hope, happiness, and assistance to sad 
and struggling men. 

There is a right way of doing everything, — to 
say, "Good morning," as if it were a good morning; 
to pay a debt as if it were a duty and not a favor; 
to talk at table as if it were still a part of the 
grace that was said; to return a book as if the Tenth 
Commandment were yet unrepealed; to say a prayer 
as if the good Allfather were still mindful of us; 
to make a trade as if the defect we hide will fester 
somewhere in our life afterward; to speak a word as 
if we alone were responsible for its final consequence; 
in fine, to illustrate the truth in conduct, sweetly, 
sincerely, bravely, constantly. 

This is the divine mission of art. It is God's 
message to the world to be obeyed in all things. 
Says Euskin, "Doing is the great thing; for if, reso- 
7 



98 Keynotes of Education. 

lutely, people do what is right, in time they come 
to like doing it." And in the words of another, 
whose name my memory misses, "Every man is valued 
in this world as he shows by his conduct he wishes 
to he valued." 

So it was with Plato, with Antoninus, with Michael 
xingelo, with Milton, with Abraham Lincoln. So it 
is with us. If we prize rightly the privilege of liv- 
ing, we will put our estimate in an expression of 
deed and kindly service; we will fill the soul with 
beautiful ideals, and measure our lives up to them. 
Herein is the imperial problem of civilization, to 
the solution of which I invoke all your learning, 
your courage, your devotion. And if, in my shambling 
words toward this end, I have warmed a single 
thought or revealed a responsibility not recognized 
before, I am thankful for this occasion and this 
hour. 



HIGHER AIMS OF JOURNALISM. 

r "F HEEE is no trouble about the progress of the 
*■ newspaper so far as machinery and methods of 
business are concerned. It has kept abreast with the 
genius of the age. The rapidity of execution and 
the beauty of product fill the breast with joy and 
pride. A great printing-press, in the majesty of its 
motion and the delicate equilibrium of its thunder- 
ing forces, is the brain of the universe, that does its 
thinking, forms its opinions, projects its enterprises, 
and fixes its character. 

There is an average of ten million newspapers 
printed every day in the United States. They carry 
into all classes intelligence that forms the lives and 
directs the destiny of men. What is derived from 
the press does more to turn us hither and thither 
than our education or our religion, and, really, it 
gives most men what they have of these. "Great is 
journalism/' said Carlyle; "for is not every editor a 
ruler of the world, being a persuader of it?" In the 
beginning, the Government established and con- 
trolled the press; now the press establishes and con- 
trols the Government. From the Fourth Estate it 
has ascended to the First. I believe, if by some sort 
of psychical camera, a composite editorial from six 
or eight prominent newspapers could be obtained, 
and capped with a "Be it enacted" — there would be 
no further use for Congress or Legislature. The 
ress provides the breath of Life for the Constitu- 

99 



100 Keynotes of Education. 

tion, and as rigid as that instrument is supposed to 
be, it bends and bows under the stroke of the pen. 
And even the august justices of the upper benches, 
who, in popular estimation, are as serene and im- 
perturbable as the Mahatmas perched on the icy crests 
of the Himalayas — even they listen to the still small 
Vox Populi, as it stirs in the columns of the news- 
paper, and gather unction and wisdom from the 
bright brevier of the editorial page, which green 
scum, or fly-specks, or the sacred habiliments of 
precedent never invade. 

And why not? The world rolls freedom's radiant 
way. Science, education, law, and religion are all 
going in that direction too. The standards of former 
years are yielding to higher ones. New conditions 
are fastening new phases to our delights and dis- 
tempers. The surges of nervous force have made 
new shores of life, and they are peopled with a new 
race, over which bends a new heaven, and around 
which science, invention, commerce, education, and 
other good angels, sing songs of triumph, hang 
cornucopias, and unfold beautiful dreams. 

There is a new everything. All the old ergos have 
taken new departures, because the facts that created 
them have changed front. Doctrines have gone with 
the draperies. The caverns of the earth are begin- 
ning to eclipse the morning stars, and the faces of 
things to shine, at last, with the greetings of creation. 

In this resplendent genesis, the press, like Alpine 
peaks, catches the first rays of the dawn. It heralds 
the first song, the first grand fact, the first mission 
of progress, and pulpit, senate, and court feel the 



Higher Aims of Journalism. 101 

divine energy, and turn it into law and gospel. 
Standing at the head of mechanical invention, repre- 
senting an organization that occupies the ends of 
the earth, and appropriating to itself the gladsome 
beams of all knowledge, it is the prince of opinion 
and the autocrat of purpose. 

But there are shadows on the wall. The man of 
opportunity is the man of responsibility, and that 
man is the one who commands the columns of a 
newspaper. A belief that common intelligence is 
a sort of alembic, capable of fusing and transmuting 
into wholesome ideas every poisonous fact put into 
it, is as great an error in psychology as it is in physi- 
olog}'. A simply poisoned fact will no more assim- 
ilate with true knowledge than strychnine with pure 
blood. They are branded as human enemies, and it 
is treason to human hopes to treat with them. Thank 
heaven, this fact is being recognized every day. In 
the sanctum, where the genial beams of civilization 
first make themselves felt, is where the demand arises 
that an editor must be a gentleman as well as a 
scholar; an educator as well as a news-dealer; a man 
of conviction as well as a political gladiator; and 
this demand is being supported by the public con- 
science and the hope of a loftier citizenship. It 
will not be long when that portion of the press, 
inoculated with the poison of indifferentism, as 
Gladstone calls it, will recede into the back lanes and 
shadows of society, to be despised of men. 

For a still higher journalism I make my plea 
to-day. In the conflict between right and wrong, 
between virtue and vice, between truth and preju- 



102 Keynotes of Education. 

dice, the newspaper should sound no languid note. 
It should not drag after the dark tendencies of the 
times, hut stand against them, and turn them toward 
brighter altitudes. Poor human nature needs all the 
assistance it can get, to enable it to hope and aspire. 
The grandest aspect of the newspaper is its moral 
agency, and there is no escape from the responsibil- 
ity which this condition imposes. Journalists should 
be held to the highest conception of those duties, 
which these opportunities require. Their great 
power should be the measure of their responsibility. 
It lies with them to promote the virtue and intelli- 
gence upon which the safety of the Kepublic depends. 
They act the coward if they refuse the trust. It is 
treason to society and the nation to tamper with or 
make light of it. The most resplendent exercise of 
the power of the press to-day would be to bring itself 
under the dominion of lofty thought and moral pur- 
pose. 

The editor should be an educated man, a man of 
learning, of high ideals, of moral convictions, of 
patriotic emotions. He may not have passed through 
college halls, or caught the gentle flavor of classic 
recitation; but he should have read enough 
and heard enough from the histories, the philos- 
ophies, the sciences, the arts, the politics of 
the world, to have caught the spirit of prog- 
ress and qualified him to know the truth when 
he sees it, or to find it when he wants it. Journal- 
ism is as much a mission as it is a business. The 
two can not be separated. The editor deals with 
the people's tastes, emotions, desires; he furnishes 



Higher Aims of Journalism. 10 



Q 



facts and ideas that affect their lives; he provides 
them with tendencies and habits; he impresses their 
social and moral nature, and makes them what they 
are. Shall ignorance and moral unconcern be in- 
vested with this sacred trust? Shall enterprise, hust- 
ling after dollars and cents, neglect the mission of 
truth, or stain its deeds with the lesson of vice? 

All professions, except journalism, prescribe tests, 
that all must meet who pass their portals. But any- 
body may become an editor. Anybody may become 
a teacher of the people, and bring to the task he 
assumes whatever ignorance, carelessness, prejudice, 
looseness of ideas, or depravity of character he may 
possess. With this investment of forces, he seeks the 
individual conscience and intelligence, and inflicts 
upon them his own temper or tenor. If he is a 
drunkard, a rake, a reviler, an illiterate, the public 
education feels the sallow sway of these faults quite 
as much as it would the gentler influence of his 
better traits. This is the logic of life. It accounts 
for much of the lubricity of the age. We say things 
and do things as if we thought that truth and right 
were fleeting incidents having no relation to God 

and eternity. 

But lacking authoritative tests, we should, as 
journalists, act up to and declare higher standards, 
and in our own teaching and practice, recognize the 
fact that journalism is a profession honored only by 
intellectual and moral worth. The conditions are 
our own, and our progress must be evolved. There 
should be a constant pressure toward high ideals, 
and ft constant censure of those that are low and 



104 Keynotes of Education. 

depraving. This is not mere Sunday-school talk — 
it wouldn't he had if it were — hut it is more: it is 
the most practical topic that can engage the attention 
of practical men; more than making pig-iron or 
huilding bridges. What sort of a citizen a man is, 
is the greatest question of the day. On his 
character rests the Eepublic. The newspaper is 
in the life of almost every person, for good or ill. 
What does it carry to him? Poison, prejudice, hope- 
lessness, error, selfish appeals, stories of vice, tales 
of inhumanity, falsehood, crime and blood, a com- 
posite of life that blurs every beauty and chills every 
hope? Or does it come to him in a spirit of candor, 
with a message of cheer, of wholesome tidings, of 
opening duties, of inspiring and informing state- 
ments, making him feel that, after all, the air is full 
of truth and honor? Or perhaps wavering between 
the two influences, between candor and prejudice, 
sacrifice and selfishness, hope and despair, he looks 
about, dazed and bewildered by headlines and illus- 
trations and sentences reeking with sorrow and blood, 
and wonders whether God or the devil rules the 
world, and thinks, perhaps, it is the devil. 

It depends largely upon who edits the paper — 
whether he is a man of education, of courage, of 
moral purpose, of love for humanity and the country. 
Men have gathered figs of figs and thistles of thistles 
since the world began, and ever will. It is the primal 
law whose supremacy invests every mote, every sun- 
beam, every emotion of the heart. We can not print 
an error, we can not stain our columns with a preju- 
dice, we can not blot white paper with an unjust 



Higher Aims of Journalism. 105 

word, we can not draw into ravels the sad story of 
stricken virtue, but that somewhere, some heart has 
been made darker and heavier. 

I am not saying this is the universal situation. I 
am not painting a picture of pessimism on the canvas 
of to-day. My tenet is optimism; but there are dis- 
colorations that gloom the scene, and to some of these 
I refer: 

1. The news. There is a wild-eyed enterprise that 
sweeps the mountain, plain, and putrid fen, gathering 
everything and winnowing nothing, and pouring out 
all, wheat, cheat, and poison-vine, as news. It is a 
mess that the ordinary mind can not separate, can not 
assimilate; but each element goes into thought, con- 
structs opinion, and builds character. It is said that 
this is what the people want — all the news — and they 
should have what they want. This is a dark heresy 
in journalism, and the papers which adopt it, and 
there are some so-called great, are foes to human 
progress. True civilization modifies, purines, and 
uplifts the wants of the people. Its end is to create 
a taste for better things. This is not promoted by 
the recital of the minutise of recreant loves, of ab- 
horrent crimes, of vile and inhuman deeds. Perhaps 
people should not be hurt by low and vicious news, 
but they are. There are few characters so fixed that 
they are not changed by what is often read and told. 
The effect of indiscriminate news is seen by any care- 
ful observer in the insincerity of opinion, the dissi- 
pation of mental energy, the belittling of serious 
thought, the taunting of religion, and other sad re- 
sults that afflict all classes of society. It is an assault 



106 Keynotes of Education. 

on true manhood and womanhood. Yet the news 
must be given, and is given by some papers of self- 
respect and considerate judgment, without leaving 
a mire in the mind for base and prurient thought to 
revel in. But they do not push the filth, double- 
leaded, sub-headed, and three-pica headlined, to the 
front, where it submerges real, honest, instructive 
news. They make it take a back seat. It is not ex- 
alted. Its proportions are contracted as its mean- 
ness expands. The horror of the Fort Thomas mur- 
der can never be fully told until the effects of flaunt- 
ing newspaper narratives on the human souls that 
greedily absorbed them, are measured in the eter- 
nities. It is not the news, but the emphasis, the 
significance, the influence given to the vile and 
vicious details, that is the guilt of journalism. Every 
murder, suicide, infidelity, prize-fight, or hanging 
could be crowded into six inches of space, and hu- 
manity is cheated if it is given more. This view may 
not be in accordance with the cribbed morals of the 
nineteenth century, but it belongs to the essence of 
truth, as I think. A just and vigorous discrimination 
of the news will and must be a feature of the higher 
journalism in the days to come. 

2. The usual newspaper controversy is not the 
road to truth. It is often paved with sharp stones, 
bordered with thorns, and terminating in a wild waste. 
Therein is more error confirmed than truth taught. 
And then, it is apt to hasten into personality and be- 
come the arena of discourtesy, vituperation, and belit- 
tling meanness. Personal controversy is one of the 
rankest weeds that grow in the garden of journalism. 
It is best that an opinion be clearly and stoutly stated, 



Higher Aims of Journalism. 107 

and that it be left to stand for the truth there is in 
it, whoever doubts or denies. There are times when 
discussion may be profitable; but this is only when 
dignity and candor prevail, and the supreme purpose 
is to get at the basic principle, evolved by the removal 
of all rubbish of partisan prejudice. The nearer men 
get together is the condition in which one or the other 
side is convinced; but the usual newspaper contro- 
versy gets them further apart, and their respective 
readers likewise. The higher journalism may not 
eschew controversy altogether; but when it engages 
in it, courtesy and candor will have full sway. 

3. No man should be allowed to attack another, 
public or private, over an anonymous signature. It 
is not just. It is not a fair and square fight. A dis- 
reputable sneak has as much influence over a nom de 
plume as a brave and honorable man has. And his 
hiding-place excites him to extravagance and mean- 
ness that he would not dare exhibit in the open field. 
Very often who writes gives all the importance to 
what is written. If a man considers it his duty to at- 
tack another, let him come out over own his signature 
like a man, but never give a sneak the opportunity to 
throw mud. In the discussion of public affairs, a 
correspondent may consistently enjoy the freedom of 
a nom de plume, but when he tips his dart with poison 
to throw at another, let him come out from under 
cover. The newspaper is an educator, and its col- 
umns should illustrate fairness and justice in all 
dealings between man and man. There is no manly 
trait that the higher journalism will fail to back and 
establish by its own conduct. 

4. The advertising columns should be edited as 



108 Keynotes of Education. 

well as the news and editorial columns. Some papers 
are made absolutely loathsome by their advertise- 
ments of catchpenny frauds and filthy nostrums. A 
healthy conscience is always circumspect, and here is 
a wide field for the exercise of this quality. An editor 
can not always indorse what may be said in his ad- 
vertisements, but the least he can do is to examine 
them and say, "I see no wrong in them," before he 
gives them space; but when he publishes a fraud 
which he knows to be a fraud, or caters to diseased 
desires with lying promises which he knows to be 
lies — points upon which it is his duty to be posted — 
he joins the advertiser in despoiling the ignorant and 
innocent, and tainting the public taste with disgust- 
ing statements. A mean advertisement is the com- 
mon people's hidden foe; and if there is anything a 
journalist ought to be-, it is a true friend of the com- 
mon people; and such a friend would just as soon lie 
to them and drag down his thoughts in the editorial 
as in the advertising column. In the higher journal- 
ism the editor will see to it that the advertising col- 
umns are kept pure, honest, and decent. Tampering 
with unholy things for money is what creates so much 
indifferentism in the sanctum; the same spirit that 
ignores the difference between a news item of char- 
acter and one of moral disintegration. 

5. Euskin makes art one of the instrumentalities 
for the education and elevation of the people. A 
man's taste and desire go much together. The usual 
newspaper illustration is not in hearty co-operation 
with this work. In many cases it is uncalled for and 
untrue. Often it is a beastly prevarication, and spoils 



Higher Aims of Journalism. 109 



the white paper it occupies. There is a lack of con- 
science in this matter of illustration — any old thing 
will do. All sorts of contortions are used for por- 
traits. If an Ashantee shakes his bamboo javelin at 
his European patron, the next day half the papers in 
America will have his picture, no two of the pictures 
alike, and not one of them true. So it is with three- 
fourths of the other pictures — they are misrepresenta- 
tions. Now, this seems to be a trifling matter, but a 
pictured he has its sad influence as well as a written 
he. It does its share to destroy the faith and force of 
the newspapers. But when art is used to emphasize 
what is entitled to no elaboration, evil is directly done. 
A paper that smears its pages with cuts of half-naked 
actresses to help low plays along, and dignifies the 
drama of ribaldry and immodesty by serious and 
lengthy descriptions, is an oracle of depraved taste 
and a purveyor of malevolent knowledge. The 
higher journalism will seek the aid of art, more and 
more, but it will be art that improves the taste and 
tells the truth. 

These suggestions are offered, from others that 
might be made, to indicate the line along which the 
evolution toward a higher journalism might proceed. 
The objection is raised that the world is not ready for 
the occupancy of those bright altitudes. This is the 
cry of despair; for it will never be ready, unless the 
editors themselves make it so. It is a question of 
inherent force. "Grant me to see, and Ajax asks no 
more." Heroism does not wait for a triumph, but 
helps win it. Holding the most effective implement 
for constructing opinion and establishing principle, 



110 Keynotes of Education. 

journalism must accept bravely the trust which that 
power imposes. Humanity in its sorrow and disaster 
pleads for the press to take a high stand. "We must 
turn away from the examples of mere financial success, 
builded on indifferentism, and answer these appeals 
with true hearts and ready hands. Moral progress 
must parallel material progress, or humanity sinks. 
The press holds the balance of power. It can build 
up or tear down. It can exalt and beautify the lives 
of men by adding to the graces of mind and heart; or 
it can disfigure and degrade by throwing about them 
the influence of mean opinions and base facts. Under 
the pressure of this alternative, I pray and believe 
journalism is about to take a positive stand, observing 
nicely the distinctions between the right and the 
wrong, the pure and the dissolute, the honest and the 
false, and on this shining summit say its say, in de- 
cisive phrase, at all times, in behalf of the true and 
the good; when the morning paper, like the rising 
sun in his glory, brings joy and promise; and the 
evening paper, like the evening sun in his beauty 
sinking, sheds a blessing and a benediction on all the 
land. 



PATRIOTISM. 

HT HE patriotism of history is the patriotism of war. 
* The climax is where a man lays down his life for 
his country. It is a sublime thing to exchange one's 
hopes and aims for the awful risk of battle; to go 
from the beauty of home to the carnage of war; to 
turn from mother or wife to the blazing cannon. It 
is no idle sentiment, this change from facing Life to 
facing death. It is the most tremendous logic of 
duty. 

The outlook from the headlands of youth is beau- 
tiful. It is filled with visions of joy, of home, of 
happy children. It is rich in opportunities and high 
endeavors, and adorned with fame and wealth and 
the smiles of friends. His hopes are the blue skies 
that bend to the sea of life in unclouded horizons far 
away. the golden vision of youth! It is why he 
lives at all. The fairest radiance of life is the bloom 
of many to-morrows. A call to war scatters it all. 
The dread alternative shatters the beautiful dream of 
life. It is an issue of unselfish duty, of dark fate, 
of heroic sacrifice. Why should the boy accept this 
reality? What call is there for him to tempt the iron 
hail? What right has the flag to his young life and 
all its possibilities? Why should he surrender his 
destiny to benefit the undefined, forgetting mass of 
humanity? 

These murmuring questions touch the foundations 
of ethics. It is more than a problem of altruism. 

Ill 



112 Keynotes of Education. 

There is somewhat of concrete and appreciable glory" 
in dying for another; but to make one's self a bare and 
nameless unit to be obliterated in behalf of national 
destiny or human hope, is quite another thing; and 
yet it adorns heroism with a humility and a faith 
that constitutes the truest, bravest sacrifices. That is 
the patriotism of the boy who shoulders the musket 
and follows the flag. And why is he willing to die 
for that? It is a beautiful emblem; it is a vision of 
grace; it is the souvenir of heroism; but it is more: 
it is the pennon of hope, the pledge of truth. It was 
evolved out of the ages, from the struggle of humanity 
toward liberty, and has gathered its stripes of blood 
and stars of hope from every conflict where, in de- 
feat or victory, human thought and moral purpose 
have advanced their standards. It is the product of 
every battle from Thermopylae to Santiago — every 
struggle that was a protest against absolutism, or 
where the divine right of man was opposed to the 
divine right of kings. That old flag stands for the 
yearning of all time. It is a badge this nation wears 
for gallant services in the struggle of human rights. 
It is a pledge committed for safe-keeping to the Amer- 
ican Eepublic, whose life and honor are incarnate in 
its ample folds. It is a position, too. It marks the 
advance of civilization's onward march. 

Think what it would mean if that flag were blotted 
from the skies; if its long battle were at last undone, 
and the arena of human will and human action were 
narrowed to the convenience of a king, and all the 
proud achievements of liberty shriveled to a relic. 
Civilization would have to begin again. The long 



Patriotism. 113 



years of suffering and struggle would again stretch 
themselves across the centuries, and absolutism would 
streak with blood the aspirations of the human soul. 
It was for more than national identity that we fought 
in 1861. The defense of a mere form of government 
was only a phase of the conflict. This Nation was 
charged by every tear, by every drop of blood, by 
every groan, imprisonment or death, with the sacred 
duty of defending every position gained for human 
rights in the long centuries of struggle; and every 
home and hope and fair ambition of youth were 
pledged to the performance of that obligation. This 
Eepublic occupied the summit of all history, toward 
which human purpose and aspiration had been climb- 
ing ever since society began to exist. It was like a 
battalion, to whose valor had been committed the 
key of battle that had been won by the sacrifice of 
brave and noble hearts. 

My friends, it was a glorious fortune, to have be- 
longed to that mighty struggle to protect the last 
fruits of sacrifice offered wherever freedom needed 
heroism and suffering. It was a magnificent duty to 
defy the leaden hail, to dash at the blazing cannon, 
and to court death for an idea. It marks the truest 
worth of a life to lay it down for truth. It is ignoble 
to live when one is quaking in the presence of error 
and injustice. Life is sacred only when it is cour- 
ageous. In the span of a moment, a man's life seems 
of supremest importance, but in the sweep of ages, 
when cause and consequence burst from the same 
calyx, and God makes up his grand ergoes from the 
roll of centuries, there will be no greater potencies 
8 



114 Keynotes of Education. 

than hearts that have been crushed in the daring of 
duty. It is the lesson of Christ's mission on the earth. 
The way to save a life is to give it for the truth. The 
Beatitudes are beautiful, but Calvary stands high 
above them like the fair brow of a mountain over the 
lilies of the valley. To die for the right is the key- 
stone of Christianity. It is the truest token of civ- 
ilisation. 

There is a sign of the times that is most refulgent. 
We are told that truth will make us free. The corol- 
lary is that freedom will make us true. There is no 
cowardice in real scholarship. Truth makes one true, 
not in that narrow sense that made the Spartan youth 
true to Leonidas, but in that broad sense that makes 
the American youth true to God. In the evolution 
of free insitutions there is a tendency toward that 
nobler education which develops those moral and spir- 
itual forces that adorn life and strengthen manhood. 
But it is more than an inspiration; it is an application 
of thought to deed. It is not only striking a wrong, 
but it is aiming the stroke truly. It is not merely 
discerning the truth or defending the right, but it is 
contriving the best implement to do the work. The 
higher the thought the better the weapon. 

My friends, it is a very simple problem when we 
see the dread alternative, and there is nothing to do 
but fight. When the musket is to be shouldered, 
there is no lack of patriotism. the glorious boys 
of America, how faithful they are! When the issue 
of right or death comes to them, they never cower 
or slink away. If some great wrong demand, as the 
price of its subversion, a thousand, a hundred thou- 



Patriotism. 1 1 ."> 



sand lives, a million bright-browed youth step out of 
home or school or farm, and say, "Here am I — take 
me." It is no personal allegiance or mere national 
pride that summons this mighty legion — it is the 
voice of duty, the command of truth. 0, when it 
comes to the ordeal of blood, this Eepublic is safe and 
invincible! The greater the need the greater the 
sacrifice that is ready. 

It is not, however, in war that our deepest concern 
lies, but in peace. We are not yet as mighty in peace 
as we are in war. The sword is not the only token of 
chivalry and courage. The true word and manly 
deed are surer signs. We are so apt to look upon the 
issues of peace as subsidiary and unrelated — to be lost 
sight of in the logic of events. The highest aspect 
of patriotism is a matter of every-day life. The na- 
tional character is made up of individual experience. 
When a man is false, selfish, impure, blasphemous, 
he lowers the national character so far as his influence 
goes. A man owes to the Eepublic Ms best thought, 
his best work, his truest manhood in time of peace as 
he owes to his country his best blood in time of war. 
The righteousness that exalteth a nation is provided 
by righteous men. Whoever helps to make up tins 
sum of righteousness is a patriot; whoever, by un- 
righteousness, helps to pull down the Eepublic, is a 
traitor. A man need not shoot at the flag or tear 
it down to dishonor it. He need not give aid and 
comfort to the enemy to be guilty of treason. In 
God's court, where the essence of men's deeds are 
weighed, and the real import of men's lives tips the 
scales, it is not a question of what the Constitution 



116 Keynotes of Education. 

defines as overt acts. Every deed that belittles and 
undermines moral purpose is an assault upon the 
national integrity. 

The patriotism that tells through every fiber of 
national existence is the patriotism that honors the 
home, the shop, the farm. If we could comprehend 
our duty to the Eepublic in the quiet service of peace 
with that large vision that inspires us in time of war, 
this Nation would be as happy and glorious as it is 
strong and hopeful. Patriotism consists of a great 
many things that belong to us as persons. Bonfires 
and skyrockets are only the tawdry of it. They are 
the effervescence that blinks and vanishes. At a 
banquet of Americans in Paris, not long ago, a man 
offered a grandiloquent toast to America. Holding 
up his glass, he said: "America, bounded on the north 
by the aurora borealis, on the south by the precession 
of equinoxes, on the east by primeval chaos, and on 
the west by the Day of Judgment." Of course, the 
toast was drunk with exhilaration and clamor. It 
sounds very patriotic and fills the boundless propor- 
tion of the common ideal. But the trouble is, that 
people are apt to consider such extravagancies as the 
real expression of patriotism, and that anything mod- 
est or simple, it matters not how true and useful it is, 
does not reach the proportions of patriotism. 

Something that is superlative or inaccessible to 
every-day purpose is, in the common mind, the 
patriotic ideal; and it is usual for people to express 
their love of country only in rampageous rhetoric, not 
for a moment supposing that the highest patriotism 
is in being a true, brave, upright citizen, doing every 



Patriotism. 117 



day the duties that lie close about, in kindness, in 
faith, in fulness, and so make the country better and 
stronger. This is loving one's country, as much as 
one's life can, into a higher purpose and truer 
strength. The glory of our country is in its citizen- 
ship, and that is an individual matter for every man 
and woman, and not an affair of aurora borealises or 
primeval chaoses at all. 

There is a certain sort of patriotism, says Tolstoi, 
that is a positive evil. It is this reckless, braggadocio 
kind that does not think, that does not care, that 
makes no difference if a thing be right or wrong, so 
our side is for it. It becomes only a question of 
material force, a matter of clubs, fists, knives, and 
pistols. It is that boastful, brandishing, brutal sort 
of patriotism whose love of country is a base passion, 
to be linked with any sort of hurrah, where the old 
flag may be lugged in. This a decrepit and wicked 
whim. Patriotism is a life. It is being honest, can- 
did, just, brave. It is founding and conducting a 
beautiful home. It is being in the community an 
exponent of the plain and simple truth. It is being- 
loyal to God at all cost, in everything we do, and 
there is nothing worth doing that does not concern 
him. You remember the American admiral in the 
Indian seas who invited the King of Siam to dine 
with him. When they sat down to dinner the ad- 
miral bowed his head and said grace before meat. 
The king looked at him a moment, curiously, and 
then said, "Missionaries pray." "Well," answered 
the admiral, "I am a missionary." 

So is every man of truth and courage. He is a 



118 Keynotes of Education. 

missionary with his cannon, his jack-plane, his law- 
hook, his yardstick, his "ballot. One need not go 
with his Bible, his tract, or his white necktie on a 
mission of good. One can find in one's every-day 
path, and the avenues of one's every-day business, a 
field of humanity as wide as China, and as varied as 
the islands of the sea; not a religious task merely, or 
a Church work, or a theme of heaven; but a strong, 
deep, sincere, urgent need of true and manly citizen- 
ship — the devotion and courage of the battle-field to 
the true and noble in trade, society, politics, and talk. 
The greatest heroisms are those of peace. Patriotism 
is home-made. 

A popular government is based on the Pauline 
principle that we are every one members of one an- 
other. We can not taint and disgrace ourselves with- 
out tainting and disgracing all the people. The re- 
sponsibility of citizenship is thoroughly personal. 
The logic is plain. God's concern in this Nation is as 
sure as it is in a forest or a stretch of sky. In one, the 
law of chemical affinity and gravitation holds sway; 
in the other, the law of love, of mercy, of justice. "We 
must recognize the law in either case. We can not 
play fast and loose. If one fails to catch the in- 
fluence of this law in all the interstices of life, wher- 
ever one goes or in whatever one does, he reaps a 
penalty in which all suffer. Every injustice, even to 
a worm; every profanity, even in a bar-room; every 
mean word, even to a tramp; every lie, even in poli- 
tics; every obscene word, even in an anecdote; every 
impurity, even in a novel; every vile scandal told un- 
der the breath, brings retribution and sorrow upon 
the whole Nation. 



Patriotism. 119 



It is certain to have that effect; for every offense 
weakens true manhood, and takes from the offender 
the inclination and power to say the right thing and 
do the right thing, when the right word or right 
thing is needed. One can not brush these faults 
away, like the dust from his coat, and that is all. 
They permeate national life. They help to swell the 
foul current of misdoing that breaks and dashes and 
roars through all channels of public life. That big 
steal up in the capitol, that scandalized home, the 
election of that corrupt boss, that swearing crowd on 
the corner, that vile novel, that yellow journal, and 
every variety of blotch and sore, have their origin in 
the great mass of profanity, scandal, dishonesty, self- 
ishness, and forgetting of God's law, contributed by 
the thoughtless, careless, selfish, unpatriotic citizen 
in his own individual life, and there are very few of 
us that do not in some way help make up that awful 
mass of unpatriotic material. 

I once heard a great concert in the city of Eome. 
There was a choir of two hundred trained voices. 
Grandly they sang. The waves of harmony broke like 
a storm over the heart or lulled it with a whisper, out 
of which rose a melody that twined and curled about 
the fancy like a reminiscence of love. Beautiful, I 
thought; but when the song had ended, there was a din 
of hisses. Surprised, I turned to a friend, and asked, 
"What does this mean ?" He answered some one in 
the choir had missed or slurred a note, or failed to 
keep correct time, and this spoiled the whole piece for 
those who knew music, and even the little ragamuffins 
on the streets are critics of that art. Thus a false 
note in the anthem of progress breaks the harmony 



120 Keynotes of Education. 

of others who adhere to the truth. This personal 
responsibility rests upon a man in all things. He is 
harmful to himself and public alike. There is no 
separation of consequences. A drunkard, a gambler, 
a liar, a demagogue, a debauchee, are just as harmful 
and infamous to the people as they are to themselves. 
Who disgraces himself, drags down the public. 

This Nation is run by politics. Politics makes our 
statutes and decrees our national purpose. Parties are 
the methods. They are probably necessary to a re- 
public. How they are used depends upon the stand- 
ard of citizenship. To raise and strengthen that 
standard is the first duty of patriotism. The only 
way to do that is for each to do it for himself. Cour- 
age, candor, truth, and morality are the investiture of 
this standard. In the wide activities of American 
life these virtues are as much needed as guns or can- 
non in war. Dense is the gloom of indifference upon 
these points. Conviction upon moral obligation is 
vague. We are getting our ideas too much from 
novels and newspaper headlines. Our reading is 
wretched. State some problem of civic or social life 
which could be settled promptly by some primal truth 
or axiom, which, however, is not thought of, but in 
its place comes up a brood of whims, conventional- 
ities, and temporal conditions that blind the judgment 
and extract a conclusion that is false and wicked. 

Whichever way we turn, an ought confronts us 
which we are apt to crush with a slur or neutralize with 
the vagaries of the passing moment. There is a hesita- 
tion, a refusal to inquire further than the temporary 
effect; how it fits in with the social and political sur- 



Patriotism. 121 



roundings, and if we can flank the crisis without peril 
or regret. I am speaking of patriotism; not of ethics 
from a polemic standpoint, hut of personal duty in 
society, in business, in politics, in church, wherever 
men meet to construct by deeds a citizenship worthy 
of the flag. Our materialistic progress has been so 
great; our inventive genius has secured so many 
triumphs; our wealth has so mightily increased; our 
national glory has blazed with such effulgence in all 
the arts and sciences, that we are more or less blinded 
and see no further than the achievements themselves. 

Our tendency is to put faith in the material and 
ignore the basis of all great and enduring success, 
which is moral truth. It is a dark fate for a human 
soul to range along the materialistic stratum and not 
behold the spiritual force that haloes every fact and 
deed that have come to bless mankind. If this was 
as much a Christian Nation in fact as it is in theory; 
if our professions would bloom aright in home and 
market-place, the glory of the Nation, as bright as 
it is to-day, would be as a spot on the sun, compared 
with the effulgence that would be then. Our country 
can not be at its best on materialistic lines. It can 
only serve itself truly by serving God, not only in 
dynamo, in steam-engine, in spectrum analysis, and 
Semitic translation, but in trading, in going some- 
where, in meeting a friend, in reading a paper, in 
talking politics, in doing nothing. 

Suppose we could rid this country of profanity, 
drunkenness, obscenity, scandalous gossip in conver- 
sation and newspaper, refusal to pay debt, corrupt 
voting and office-seeking, the cowardly demagogism 



122 Keynotes of Education. 

of Legislatures — could any one imagine the height of 
its glory or the horizon of its happiness? Every pro- 
fane word is treason against the flag, because it is 
treason against God. Profanity lowers manhood, 
citizenship, and country. It is a sign of moral reck- 
lessness. Think of a public opinion that is smeared 
all over with insults to God. Every insult to God is 
an insult to the country's flag. Look at it that way, 
too. It is a pleasure to note that profanity is de- 
creasing; that it is banished from the society of gen- 
tlemen; it is restricted to bad boys, mad men, and the 
saloon. General Grant did a great patriotic service 
to his country when he said to the man who swore in 
his presence, "I never take the name of God in vain." 
That declaration adds splendor to Vicksburg and 
Appomattox. 

Drunkenness, too, is arousing the disgust of all 
decent men. It is a sin against the country, because 
it lowers the standard of citizenship, and breeds a 
hundred vices that menace the Eepublic and blacken 
its fame. Saloons are the schools of treason, and true 
patriots do not support them now. Whisky is the visi- 
ble presence of the devil, and whisky politics darkens 
every hope of the Eepublic. Whatever it touches it 
pollutes. Patriotism hates it as it hates disunion or 
Spanish cruelty. 

And so with scandal and obscenity, which de- 
grade the soul and undermine manly purpose. There 
is loss of power in groveling among the things that 
are gross and vile. How can we practice indecency 
and revere the old flag sincerely? How can we be 
barbarians and true American citizens at the same 



Patriotism. 1 2 



■ ' 



time? One compromises himself with a vile story, 
told even in jest. The plane of thought is sure to 
descend if one illustrate it with impurity. It is the 
devil's own fact that is upheld by a scandal or a 
wanton imbroglio. Mind, I am not speaking of ethics 
in a personal sense, or touching the obligation of man 
to God, but of those relations in the State which affect 
the character of the Nation and make up the sum of 
wrongful conduct that drags it down. 

There is another insinuating and destructive evil, 
so personal that it might be considered isolated or 
unrelated, and that is the growing lack of conscience 
in the matter of paying debts. No one can estimate 
the virulence of the poison put into American blood 
by the prevalence of broken promises. It is one of 
the worst pests of civic righteousness. The indif- 
ference to personal obligation gives one a status that 
involves much more than he is aware of. Can a man 
be faithful to his country and false to his friend? 
Can he defend the rights of his country and trample 
upon those of his neighbor? 

A man owes you a dollar, but spends it for tobacco, 
the theater, or luxury of any kind, may not seem to 
rise to the dignity of a patriotic problem; but a thou- 
sand such cases unsteady public sentiment, and a 
hundred thousand wipe out the lines of moral distinc- 
tion in the common affairs of life. Like a clear pool 
that a drop of carmine will not affect, a hundred will 
make it blush, a thousand will make it rage. The 
accumulated force of ignored obligations goes far to 
explain the jobs, grabs, and legal steals in public life. 
A public sentiment formed of a persistent and uni- 



124 Keynotes of Education. 



versal habit of standing by private credit would save 
this Kepublic from all issues involving the mainte- 
nance of its own faith ; and not only in finance, but it 
would waken and uplift all the higher and holier 
instincts of national life. 

Again, the complacency so universal regarding our 
educational system and practice is an attitude of 
public thought that is retarding the deeper and nobler 
progress of our Nation. We are charmed by a name. 
A school is a school; a book is a book; but everything 
depends upon what the school is and what the book 
is. You can not feed the soul on matter and make it 
grow. You can not make men out of things. The 
simple fact must be winged by the spirit, lest it sink 
to earth and catch low taints. Education, to be real, 
must be more than secular; it must be sacred and 
divine. On the moral side of knowledge is real truth. 
The new education is patriotic. It is the second gos- 
pel to mankind, because it teaches the beautiful har- 
mony of light, life, love, and truth in the evolution 
of the child who, in the future, is to carry the old 
flag with its message of freedom and justice, not only 
to the nations of the world, but to his own community 
and his own home. The sacred cause of education 
should not be committed to rude hands and empty 
minds. It belongs to men of intelligence, of true 
character, and high ideals, and such only should be 
elected to school boards. Developing a child's soul 
to prepare it for the duties of life and to give it cour- 
age, faith, and purpose, is a serious and sacred task, 
that is to a great extent ill-performed. 

There is still another arena of duty to enter, and 



Patriotism. 1 •_' ."> 



that is the field of politics. Every patriot should be a 
politician — not a parasitic, sycophantic, office-seeking 
collar- wearer, but a clear-headed, stout-hearted, and 
clean-handed man, who is willing to starve or die 
for the truth. It is treason to stand on the outside 
and mourn because politics are foul, and do nothing 
to purify them. It is disloyalty to permit the shriek 
of despair to drown the call to duty. What else is it, 
if one flinches, when one sees corruption and venality 
filling the avenues of political control, and retires to 
the summit of purification and self-holiness, declar- 
ing that politics is too mean and dirty a conflict for 
him to risk his innocence in, and cowardly permits 
whisky and boodle to win ? True heroism measures 
the duty by the need. Politics runs the country, and 
if bad men run the politics, drive them off. That is 
the only thing to do. If the decent, self-respecting 
members of the Eepublican, Democratic, or any other 
party, would combine and fight the minions of polit- 
ical depravity hand to hand, the flag would float more 
grandly yet. A man will say, my party is too corrupt, 
I will leave it. Where will you go? Garfield has 
said, "You can't run a government without party." 
Parties represent average ideas of great bodies of men. 
They may not tally with my convictions at all points; 
but I stand a better chance of putting those convic- 
tions into political decree inside of a party than I 
will by striking the air on the outside. 

I claim it is quite as much a man's duty to go to 
the primary as to the prayer-meeting. That is the 
foundation of political power. it is tainted with 
whisky, boodle, and bossism, say you. Well, that is 



126 Keynotes of Edtication. 

the reason you should go there. We can not escape 
a duty by urging a repugnance to the situation where 
the duty lies. In the providence of God, an unpleas- 
ant duty raises one nearer heaven than a pleasant duty 
does. There is more cross in it. Beautiful deeds are 
the stairs to heaven, reaching there round by round; 
but sacrifice is the chariot of fire that flashes at once 
on the great white throne. Heroism does n't go minc- 
ing around after zephyrous duties. It goes straight 
to where it is needed. Political infamy can not be 
reduced by growling. It must be met by argument 
and man to man. 

What this country needs is manly politics, and the 
only way to get such is for manly men to go into the 
conflict. They must recognize the party fact. Ee- 
member that party is not primarily an organization to 
declare a definite form of political opinion. That is 
supplemental. Party is inherent in society. It has 
existed on the same lines through all ages and civiliza- 
tions. It relates to the function and power of society. 
The duty is determined by the power. The function 
prescribes the policy. God put every political issue 
in the organic constitution of society, as he put the 
planets in the nebulaa before the morning of the 
world. Politics began with Eden. The first question 
ever asked was, "Where art thou?" And to the first- 
born came the issue that has divided all human 
thought ever since, "Where is thy brother?" That 
question seems to have struck at the very operations 
of the human intellect and divided the very processes 
of reason, from Paradise to the Millennium. 

rTot only in politics and sociology does the dividing 



Patriotism. 127 



line lay across the centuries and through all races; 
hut in philosophy, in ethics, in religion as well. Back 
of the mists and fogs of self-seeking, of bossism, and 
personal controversy; back of the clouds of passion, 
prejudice and nasty demagogism ; up in the blue sky 
where Constantine's sign hung, is emblazoned in let- 
ters of light the answer which is the question of hu- 
man duty in all time, "Am I my brother's keeper?" 
Whoever says no to that mighty question is in politics 
up to his neck. Whoever says yes, ought to be. Be- 
cause shrewd, selfish men go into politics to pervert 
the function of society to ignoble ends, is the reason 
true men should follow — to drive them off. Of all 
the traitors to the flag, that ring, banded to despoil 
the country in the name of party, is the meanest. The 
boss is the Benedict Arnold of American politics. His 
highest joy is to stifle independence and smite sin- 
cerity. Wherever he is on Ms chosen field, within his 
own party lines, he should be fought to the finish. 
If he wins, stick and try him again. In the very logic 
of politics, there is nothing else to do. Do not run off 
into the caverns of gloom to weep, or up on the sum- 
mits of independence to hurl defiance. That is just 
what the boss wants. If a preacher does n't go among 
his people to help organize against him, he doesn't 
care how much he is denounced in the pulpit. 

Politics is not painting lilies. Patriotism is not 
writing poetry. Both are the most practical things — 
they do, they dare, they suffer, they die. The widest 
open field to-day for patriotic duty is the political 
party. Ifc is the opportunity no manly spirit can re- 
fuse to embrace; for the purification and elevation of 



128 Keynotes of Patriotism. 

party is the directest method for purifying and ele- 
vating the country. I wish I might pursue this rela- 
tion of private life to patriotic duty in other aspects — 
in the matter of parental control of children, in one's 
attitude toward religion, in the practical use of can- 
dor, in the ways one lives at home, the temper of busi- 
ness and social intercourse, the tendencies and influ- 
ences of leisure moments, the awful effects of narcot- 
ics, and the ill-use of medicine — matters that deter- 
mine the standard of our citizenship, because they fix 
the character of our every-day lives. 

What we are is the imperial fact. A few days ago, 
hurrying past the amphitheater at Chautauqua, I 
caught this sentence from the preacher conducting 
devotional service: "Your life gives to prayer its 
value. " That is true, and so it is true as to patriotism. 
It is absurd for a man to lie and cheat and think 
and say mean things, and placate the devil day after 
day, and then suppose he can get even with God by 
prayer at night. A man who, through the day, swears 
and gets drunk, treats his neighbor dishonestly, be- 
fouls his own thoughts, acts a coward in public life — 
he drags down the old flag, notwithstanding he builds 
bonfires and sings "The Star-Spangled Banner" every 
night. What a man is, determines whether he is a 
patriot or a traitor. Thank God, that is the gospel of 
my country. It is the orthodoxy of patriotism. It is 
the golden land of hope. 

My friends, we can never learn the lesson too well 
that moral worth is the doctrine of the Stars and 
Stripes. All that we have attained thus far has been 
achieved upon that idea. What strength it gave us 
when humanity stretched out its arm for protection! 



Patriotism. 129 



We had no navy, we had no army; hut never did 
truth, though navyless and armyless, gain a grander 
or swifter triumph. I hope this country will never 
rely wholly on a resplendent navy or a great standing 
army. God is on the side of the heaviest artillery is 
a Napoleonic lie. He is on the side of truth, of virtue, 
and of moral worth; and that is the basic idea of this 
Republic. If we turn from that and put our trust in 
glittering bayonets, the blaze of epaulets, or canis- 
ters of glycerine, we exchange the faith of the people 
for the prayer of monarchy. We never want to substi- 
tute the armored cruiser for God Almighty; rather, 
we must depend upon him for it, by living true, hon- 
est, faithful lives in times of peace; then he will stand 
by us. He will steady our hand and clear our vision 
for better aim. 

While pointing out the foes of the old flag, I have 
supreme trust that they will yet weaken as the days 
go by, and that faith in God will become a grand 
reality right down among the common duties of life, 
where it is needed more than anywhere else. Science, 
education, religion, and thoughtful common sense are 
seeing every clay, more and more, that the harmony 
between truth and triumph is as sure as between 
gravitation and the fall of a stone; and to push the 
dominancy of this fact everywhere into experience 
is as grand a duty as to stand on the bridge of a 
ship and direct a fleet in the lightning and thunder 
of battle. 

A young man, a college graduate, an athlete, a son 
of a millionaire, asked what is the humblest, hardest, 
most dangerous duty he could perform for his country 
in the late war. He was informed, in the hold of a 



130 Keynotes of Education. 

ship of war, feeding the hungry boilers with fuel. 
Thither he went, and in the fiery tomb, buried out of 
the world, he shoveled coal, to supply life to the big 
cruiser. Shut up in the midst of battle, where the 
flames hissed and roared, and the air was stifling and 
burning hot, where comrade after comrade sank ex- 
hausted and dying, and where a big shot from the 
enemy might at any moment send them all to the 
bottom of the sea, that boy worked at his awful task. 
No honor for him. His duty wore no emblem. The 
world knew him not. He obeyed the head fireman; 
the head fireman obeyed the stoker ; the stoker, the 
engineer; the engineer, the captain; the captain, the 
commodore — how far upward winds the path of 
glory! — the commodore, the admiral; the admiral, the 
Secretary of the Navy; the Secretary of the Navy, the 
President; the President, the people; the people, God. 
So complicated and ceremonious is the machinery of 
authority and honor that we fail to see through its 
gorgeous glamour; but God does not. First of all, he 
sees down there in that furnace of sacrifice the boy 
who has forsaken wealth, hope, fame, and all this 
world's gifts, for an unseen, unromantic, forgotten 
death in the black, blazing hold of the cruiser. God 
never sees an office. He does n't know any generals, 
commodores, ministers of war, doctors of divinity, 
professors, or such terrestrial tawdry. He sees the man 
only — the soul that does a humble duty bravely, with- 
out asking if there is a string to it. I love our old 
generals and colonels, and my fairest memories min- 
gle with their fame; but the boy who stood by my side 
and shot his musket dwells in my heart deeper and 
surer than any other man. The Government can not 



Patriotism. \:\\ 



honor him by title or resolution; it can give no prefer- 
ence that can exalt the fireman of the cruiser a point 
higher than his self-sacrifice has won for him. There 
is only one way to honor the memory of that grand 
boy, and that is to devote our lives to the country for 
which he died — to render to his heroic memory the 
tribute of a pure, honest, upright, unselfish, cour- 
ageous life, by every one of us. 

My friends, I seek to uplift and exhilarate the per- 
sonal impulse. A Texas professor who volunteered 
as a private wrote to a friend from the trenches of 
El Caney: "Here, in the ranks, I have lost my Ego 
completely.*'" 1 "Well, in the selfish light of this world's 
scramble, he has; but in God's sight he stands forth 
like Altair among the star-dust. There is not a Beati - 
tude but panoplies him. "When one of God's angels 
comes down and touches a man's heart with the in- 
spiration of duty, it leaves there two forces to accom- 
plish the mission — courage and humility; if he add a 
purpose of his own, the consequences will belong to 
the drift of next week, or next year. We people who 
believe that God reigns, spend nine-tenths of our time 
on the theory that he does n't. If we obeyed God's 
moral laws as faithfully as the lily, the brook, the 
star, obeys his natural laws, our lives would be jusl 
as beautiful. God is fully as beneficent in his laws to 
the human soul as he is to the rose or the sunset. 

But what has all this to do with patriotism? Just 
as much as the petals have to do with the flower, or the 
constellations have to do with the sides. The love of 
country depends upon how lovable it is. That is not 
a matter of mountains or streams or natural resoun 
China, Turkey, and the Philippines have all th( 



132 Keynotes of Education. 

It is a matter of citizenship, which in turn is a matter 
of individual character; and the purer, truer, braver, 
more unselfish the man is, the more he adds to the 
love of country. 

I do not make this analysis for argument's sake, 
hut for sentiment's sake. The mission of this address 
is to help create a public sentiment that true patriot- 
ism is a matter of individual life and aim, and the 
best, the most effective, the only way, is to add to 
American citizenship as many of the graces of faith 
in God as our own little lives can bring to it. ISTo 
other sort of patriotism is worth talking about, ISTo 
other sort of patriotism will keep the old flag flying 
up in the blue sky of God's benediction. We may 
perform feats of daring; we may win victories; so did 
Alexander, Attila, and Napoleon. But the glory of a 
victory consists of the truth and justice there are in 
it. And these elements lie in the lives of men back 
of the cause. If they are sordid, selfish, base, so is the 
victory; if they are profane, impure, drunken, so is 
the victory. War has no special privilege in moral 
dynamics. It is thorn bearing thorn, or fig bearing 
fig, all the way. I do not want to seem to carry in my 
words the slightest blaze of pyrotechnics. I want to 
keep on solid ground, and deal with real things; and 
I say that a man is a patriot only to the extent that 
his life is made up of pure thoughts, honest words, 
helpful deeds, and the championship of moral truth; 
and whoever does not add to that righteousness which 
exalteth a nation is a recreant citizen and false to the 
flag. This is the very law of action and reaction. It 
is as plain as two and two make four. 



PERSONAL FORCE OF THE TEACHER. 

r ~piIERE is a portion of the colloquy between Ben 
* Hur and his mother on the housetop of their 
Jerusalem home that possesses much educational 
value. You remember Ben Hur's question to his 
mother, after that talk with Messala, in the market- 
place, and how the mother, doubtful of her ability to 
answer, said: 

"What you propose, my Judah, is not a subject 
for treatment by a woman. Let me put its considera- 
tion off till to-morrow, and I will have the wise 
Simeon — " 

"Do not send me to the rector," he said, abruptly. 

"I will have him come to us." 

"No, I seek more than information; while he might 
give that better than you, my mother, you can do 
better by giving me what he can not — the resolution 
that is the soul of a man's soul." 

I think the lesson is, that true knowledge involves 
inspiration, faith, duty; and the maintenance of this 
divine unity depends upon the teacher. 

Now, at the start, I do not want any one to think 
I minify instruction or discount knowledge. I exalt 
them rather. I defend the text-book. I praise the 
fact and the process. But they are means to an end; 
and if they do not establish relations that break into 
tendrils which take hold on life; if they do not warm 
one up to an embrace of purpose and duty, their end 
may be good or bad. 

133 



134 Keynotes of Education. 

I think, therefore, the duty of the hour is the de- 
velopment of the teacher, and the establishment of 
those tendencies that arouse and exercise inspiration, 
faith, hope, love, and resolution, which is the soul of 
a man's soul. 

This development is threefold: 

First — Physically. A teacher should be a well man 
or woman. His personality is incomplete without it. 
Here blood tells. Distempers assert themselves. A 
case of headache, dyspepsia, backache, rheumatism, 
will debilitate a whole school. What sort of enthu- 
siasm can one arouse in a recitation if the backache 
has seized one with its iron clampers-? How much 
faith can one evolve from an incessant cold? What 
amount of love and sympathy radiates from a case of 
indigestion? What is there in rheumatism to awaken 
a lofty purpose? These malign conditions must have 
their influence. They oppress and imprison the 
teacher; they make his world small and gloomy; they 
rob his horizons of sunsets and golden dreams. Now, 
the schoolroom is the place to begin life aright. It 
demands every advantage. It demands pure blood, 
sound muscles, decent stomachs, and backbones with 
a spring to them. How else can we cultivate the 
amenities of life, the courtesies, the sympathies, the 
inspirations, the duties, and those attributes that min- 
ister to the progress and elevation of society? Think 
of a poor, wayward boy, from a home of ignorance and 
scolding, for some transgression of the rules, brought 
up for trial before a case of dyspepsia. Think of a 
class in problems or parsing, looking, longing for the 
effulgence of nervous debility to light it out of its 
jungles. 



Personal Force of the Teacher. 135 



I insist that a sound body is an ingredient of peda- 
gogical equipment. There are needed thrilling mus- 
cles, tingling blood, the joy of health in organ and 
limb to blend duty and endeavor with life, and gild 
the old world with deeds of beauty and love. Such 
he should have who undertakes to lead, counsel, and 
inspire the young. The school years of a child s lite 
is a pivot on which eternity whirls. There he needs 
the rightly-set currents, the sweet harmonies of na- 
ture, the heart's gentlest devotion, to hold him toward 
the truth. A mere ideality will not do it. The voice 
of cherubim and seraphim will not do it. The shades 
of Thomas Harvey and Joseph Kay will not do it. 
What he must have is a warm-hearted, clear-eyed, 
hio-h-thoughted precept in tire concrete, standing in 
the shining path ahead, and beckoning him-jnst , as 
the world had its divinity. Therein is the force of the 
teacher. It is the greatest demand of the hour 

Second-Intellectually. The teacher must not be 
a pedant. He must not lose himself in the dry and 
arbitrary details of a problem or a rule of parsing, 
he should know how, but he should know also why. 
The mind is easily pressed and twisted ou of shape. 
It yields to the potency of some fact or idea, and is 
occupied by it as the seal occupies the wax. M md 
yo u I do not refer to that fine frenzy of the sou that 
"breaks forth anon in the heat of some &**£% 
I mean the personal whim, the text-book «»M»£f 
end of information, that squeezes the mind into insig- 
nificant proportions and perverts it to the cold formal 
itv of knowledge. I knew a teacher who passed 
through the various phases of a decimal tectum a 
Latin root, a trilobite, and an acute angle, as he trav 



136 Keynotes of Education. 



ersed these topics. Each thing in turn he was. The 
big, throbbing, beautiful world of duty was contracted 
to a pen, fenced by his narrow views, and in these he 
attempted to drive all his pupils. They would n't go. 
They scattered. Their souls hankered for better 
tilings than dead vocables and grammatical cinders, 
as Carlisle calls this instruction. They clamored for 
common sense, spirituality, love, and inspiration. 
These are the true motors of mental progress. The 
best part of a teaching intellect is intuition— the di- 
vine grace within recognizing the divine hand with- 
out. This is not mere sentiment; it is the fact on 
which we must bottom, as John Locke expresses it. 
We have no right to tether ourselves to a post, and 
then worship the post. We must seek the altitudes 
where the air is pure and the skies spread wide— there 
with poets, seers, thinkers, and reformers to mingle. 
A man is known by the company he keeps. I have in 
my mind a few questions, better than any ten ques- 
tions ever asked at an examination, to discover the 
merits of a teacher. Who is your favorite poet ? What 
books have you read in the past year? What maga- 
zine do you read? What is the latest scientific discov- 
ery? Give some doctrine of a modern educational re- 
former. How do you regard it? Such questions deter- 
mine mental trend and scope — whether a man is a 
trilobite or kindred spirit. This incoming and out- 
going of classes— this shuttle of education! What is 
it weaving for you, my teacher? Is it the fabric of 
a true life, strong in texture, warm in color, beautiful 
in design, and useful in form? Whatever it is, remem- 
ber, it is the projection of your own intellect. Make 
it strong, make it beautiful, make it useful. 



Personal Force of the Teacher. 137 



I had an idea to say somewhat more of the urgent 
need of common sense, in all things, respecting the 
training of youth, hut this is involved in what I have 
said. It is the universal wisdom. It is that poise 
which gives one the command of things. He does not 
have to know all; but there is a harmony in the rela- 
tions between what he does not know and what he 
does know. There is a knowledge that is always stick- 
ing out and is always in somebody's way. It protrudes 
only to warn. Education is a tendency toward unity. 
There is not a stray ray of light in the universe, but it 
beams from some sun and kisses some flower. The sun 
would rock if an atom of musk were annihilated. It 
is the broad view that exalts individualism, for it re- 
veals the divine relations, which is the essence of life. 
Such should be the scope of the teaching intellect, 
to mingle with the idealities and find a grace in the 
utmost meaning of things. Let us have teachers who 
symbolize the sweet, serious truth of the universe as 
the flowers symbolize God's love of the beautiful. 

Third — As to Moral Character. Schoolteaching is 
the most sacred of occupations. It deals with the 
most delicate and divine things. In other callings, 
faults and vices may not leave their traces so visibly 
upon their work; but in the schoolroom there is no 
escape. The whole man stands there, with whatever 
he is endowed — his defects and weaknesses asserting 
themselves with all their strength, whatever may be 
the force of his virtues and amenities. He can not 
hide himself. He is to every pupil just what he is. 
The glamour of manner may obscure reality for a 
moment, but only for a moment. The child need not 
watch for blemishes; he may not even see them, or be 



138 Keynotes of Education. 

conscious of them, but all the time their influence is 
felt. Were we able to analyze that wonderful com- 
posite called character, after the manner of the chem- 
ists, separating it into its essential parts, and tracing 
back each result to its constituent elements, we would 
find their origin in association and example. 

Life is an induction. It is made up of little things, 
done or undone; trifles, perchance as light as air, at 
first, but oft repeated, harden into habit and construct 
character. Deed is added unto deed, dream unto 
dream, folly unto folly, by all the processes of envi- 
ronment, each ingredient getting a special quality as 
the process is better or worse, and so, generalizing 
little bits of experience into a form of conduct that 
rules the life and projects destiny. In all this process, 
the moral maxim plays little or no part. It may 
evolve one, but it is not controlled by one. The de- 
duction comes when the work is done. First, the 
process, then the rule. You must do His will, if you 
would know of the doctrine. 

So our lives are thoroughly, awfully concrete. 
Everything counts. Every deed is a king. It is des- 
potic within its domain. The schoolroom is the 
teacher's realm. Whatever he says or does, how he 
says it and how he does it, and what he omits to do, 
materialize at once into a dictator. The child is a 
loyal subject. His nature is a matrix that catches 
impressions so readily that every line, every scratch, 
every blur, leaves its mark. There is no escape. 
Courtesy begets courtesy, candor begets candor, gen- 
tleness begets gentleness, patience begets patience, in- 
dolence begets indolence, carelessness begets careless- 



Personal Force of the Teacher. L39 

ness, spite begets spite, selfishness begets selfishness, 
untidiness begets untidiness, tattle begets tattle, slang 
begets slang, sham begets sham — and so the despotic 
induction moves along to the relentless ergo. 

There is no maxim so often quoted at teachers' 
examinations as, "As the teacher is, so is the school.'" 
It seems to be universally acknowledged. It has be- 
come so common a saying that we fear it has lost the 
best part of its force. The common belief remits it 
to schoolroom application, but the proposition makes 
no such restriction — as the teacher is, at home, on the 
street, in the store, on the steamboat. What has edu- 
cation done for him, even so will he do for education. 
How does he bear himself in the current of affairs, 
among his fellows, where the demand for worth, for 
fidelity, for integrity, for earnest work and true think- 
ing is ever urgent — how does he bear himself? This 
is the test. This shows what the teacher is. He may 
try to appear something else in the school, but it will 
not work. The bitter fruit will come from the bitter 
tree — 't is God's law that allows no exception. If the 
teacher is a loafer anywhere, he is a loafer in the 
schoolroom. What he is on Saturdays and Sundays 
and after school, so he is in the schoolhouse. If he 
invades the grocer's counter and engages in the friv- 
olous babble of worthless people, he will carry that 
babble into the schoolroom. If he exchanges slang 
on the street corners, or tilts back in the hotels and 
dips an oar in the muddy gossip, he will carry that 
mud and slang into the school. He can't help it. 
You can't gather figs from thistles. As the teacher 
is, so is the school. 



140 Keynotes of Education. 

He may thunder apothegms of moral excellence all 
day long; he may decorate the wall with yirtuous. 
mottoes in gilded text; he may even lecture on the 
grandeur of truth and justice, and exalt the good and 
tender, with loving eloquence — but all in vain. Edu- 
cation does not grow that way. It grows by the 
accretion of living truths — deeds beating with pur- 
pose that reach out for things aldn — like the tissue 
grows: throbbing cell to throbbing cell, tendency to 
tendency, like to like. 

Alas, if there be no environment to provide the 
needed sustenance! 

In this world of beauty, of power, of progress; 
where the very clods and stones are full of speech 
and music; where the heavens are bending with stars; 
where the hills uplift their forms to unfold the pages 
of ages gone; where the plains stretch with verdure, 
and flowers, and singing waters, out to the golden 
sunsets; where men and women adorn life with 
glorious achievements of genius and thought — there 
is enough to inspire every teacher with that devotion 
and sympathy which will go forward to meet the 
cravings of the child's soul, and add to it sweetness, 
strength, and purpose. One can not avail himself of 
these heavenly resources without shedding their be- 
nign influences by one's very presence. 

'T is said that Emerson once refused to address an 
audience when some one cried out, "Get on the plat- 
form and let us see you think." We all can not be 
Emersons, or Pestalozzis, or Froebels; but to the ex- 
tent of our opportunities, which are always greater 
than we embrace; and to the extent of our capacities, 
which are always greater than we employ, we should 



Personal Force of the Teacher. 1 4 1 

gather the godlike forces that play around us every- 
where, and make them, in every act and word, min- 
ister unto the child. 

And then, great fact it is too, the more one be- 
comes animated by the spirit of true knowledge, the 
fuller and deeper the essence of things pervades him 
and he catches the unseen current in which dwells the 
divine meaning of things, the simpler and sweeter Ms 
own thought; so that he comes gracefully to the level 
of the child, just as the Great Teacher himself did. 

As the teacher is. His walk, his talk, his silence, 
his manner, his associations, the books he reads, his 
aims in life, his favorite haunts, his conduct at ho i 
his habits of every hue — all contribute to the force 
of example, which is the only text provided in the 
public school for the moral and social development 
of the child. Whatever this text lacks, or whatever 
of ill instruction it provides, can not be remedied 1 » y 
a rigid devotion to arithmetic and grammar. We can 
not interpose tricks at figures and syntax between 
the influence of our example and the destiny of the 
child. The concrete will have its way, and mere 
mental discipline will mold itself about it. If it be 
our purpose to throw responsibility, and push depend- 
ence to the matter of mental discipline merely, we 
might, quite as well, substitute "Pigs in Clover" or 
"Pole on Whist" for much of the statutory curricu- 
lum. 0! this text-book atonement is tiresome beyond 
expression! Somehow or other the fatality is abroad, 
and has grown to the august supremacy of a religious 
dogma, that all education lies within the lids of an 
arithmetic, like unborn forests in an acorn-cup. 

Some time ago, at one of our quarterly institutes. 



142 Keynotes of Education. 

one of our lady teachers read a paper on "Hints," the 
chief thought of which was to excite the youth to an 
observation of, and investigation into, the common 
objects about him. This is well. All in the insti- 
tute fervidly acquiesced; but the want of time seemed 
to appeal to every teacher, so there was a division of 
opinion between devoting the general exercise or the 
reading lesson to some thoughts of the matter. No 
one ever thought for a moment of desecrating the 
sacred precincts of parsing and ciphering. Over the 
gates of this paradise two flaming swords whirled and 
whirled. Across the jangle of the phonics, not a 
bird-note must be allowed to sing its way. The color 
of the rose, the glint of the butterfly's wing, the velvet 
vestment of the cliff, the divine geometry of the snow- 
flake — all these must be pushed aside, to give room 
at the shrine of the child's love for the least common 
multiple and the mountains of Kini Baloo. 

Well, we must get out of this jungle. If there is 
no way, we must do as the noble Roman did — make 
one. We must get out to where manhood and wom- 
anhood stand some chance. 

So the argument is, as the personality of the 
teacher impresses the school, his traits, habits, ten- 
dencies, and personal forces must be of a character to 
develop and uplift the child; and then he must make 
room for the play of these influences, not only 
through the force of example, hut through observa- 
tion and knowledge in harmony with the nature of 
the child; and to find time for it, let him reduce other 
branches to twice or thrice a week, as the case may 
require. It is high time that the pounding and lathe- 



Persoiial Force of the Teacher. 1 ! :; 

ing to make intellectual gimlets out of children's souls 
were stopped. The problem of the hour then is, to 
organize on a practical basis the processes for incul- 
cating the new ideas. 

Finally, the teacher should be progressive. Edu- 
cation means progress. A stand-still teacher is a dull 
tool that botches work. Imagine a teacher, with the 
stale knowledge of days long gone, inspiring the youth 
on whose brow the dawn of the twentieth century 
rests! Still, there are those who are trying to do this. 
What we need is a spirit of advancement. The good 
teacher will know what the thinkers are thinking, 
what the earth is evolving, what the heavens are tell- 
ing. He will read good books. He will read the 
Forum, the North American Beview, the Popular 
Science Monthly; or, if not these, for economy's sake, 
the cheaper ones — Munsey's, McClure's, or Cosmo- 
politan. It is an indication that he is on the altitude 
of the best thought, the progressive purpose, the liv- 
ing enlightenment of the age. Many teachers mope 
through life with no other horizons than the adjacent 
hilltops of their own native domain. There may be 
virtue, and worth, and honest purpose, but how much 
of the light of God's teeming world is excluded! 
Now, the teacher needs this light, or as much as he 
can get. It is necessary to health, growth, life, and 
enjoyment. It makes one's work fairer; it makes the 
children dearer; it makes knowledge sweeter. There 
is positively nothing in the text-book but depression; 
it rests with the teacher to raise that; but can he do 
it, if he be a serf himself? He must first break hie 
chains. "'Who would be free, himself must strike 



144 Keynotes of Education. 

the blow," says Byron. Do not wait for institutes to 
pull you out, or the Board of Examiners to freeze 
you out; hut simply get out of the ruts. When a bal- 
loonist wants to make a journey, he cuts his ropes and 
rises; he keeps throwing out the dead weights of sand, 
and rises, up and up, till he reaches the altitude where 
blows the current toward his destination, and thither 
he sails through the mild blue air, on an ocean of 
light, to the haven of his yearning. So we should 
cast off our weights and clogs, and rise to the standard 
of excellence, and move off on a higher plane and in 
the trend of the best thought, the highest purpose, 
and the broadest intelligence of the times. Our 
schools need this; our citizenship needs it; our coun- 
try demands it. 

But in one thing, particularly, should the pro- 
gressive spirit be shown, and that is the science of 
education. There are new ideas and methods born of 
these days of advance. Who could expect otherwise? 
Every physical fact, arising in these days of discovery 
and invention, proclaims a theory that sways in the 
educational world. There is not a physical law but 
has its moral and mental counterpart, and to- 
gether they march to triumphs that open to humanity 
a fairer and brighter world. These influences reach 
to the schoolroom, and the teacher should be able to 
subject the child to them, and thereby rescue him 
from the bondage of the past. 

The regime, of the pedagogue with his club, and 
his eternal a, b, abs, and villainous sums, has ended. 
The autocratic Gradgrind has gone with the leeching 
doctor and the hellfire preacher. True growth is 
mild and sweet. Pulling the tendril does not make it 



Personal Force of the Teacher. 145 

increase. From a star-mist to a solar system, silence 
ruled. It simply became. The conditions of be- 
coming are the teacher's affair. He furnishes the 
sunshine and the shower, the tilling, the mulching, 
and the fertilizing; he removes the dead weights and 
drives off the birds of prey. To do these things well, 
he must be equipped with the achievements of the 
nineteenth century — he must know its knowledge, its 
philosophy, its invention. From him must radiate 
the blessings God has bestowed upon the age. 

There is abroad a stolid indifference to these bright 
aims and resources. Some seem to think that they 
must dwell in the front part of the nineteenth cen- 
tury and ignore the triumphs of the profession they 
adopt. This is treason — treason to the profession 
and to the child. 

0, teacher, let us look up! Let us bare our brows 
to the gladsome light of knowledge; to the beneficent 
radiance of the age; and let us, as heirs of all the ages, 
accept the birthright, heartily and resolutely. And 
this does not mean wandering through bowers, and 
plucking jessamines and honeysuckles to deck our- 
selves for festal days, recurring ever. It means work, 
continuous work, but not repulsive work. God does 
not make growth painful. He makes it gentle and 
happy; and so may we, if we escape the cribbed 
treadmill of the past and get out into the fields of 
love and beauty. 

Now, to recapitulate, the teacher should be a 
healthy person; he should possess common sense and 
intelligence; he should have a strong moral purpose 
and habit; he should be progressive. 

And then, as the school is organized and supported 



146 Keynotes on Education. 

to promote good citizenship, it follows that the 
teacher must be a model citizen. I have hinted at the. 
make-up of the teacher; how does it meet the require- 
ments of the model citizen? 

I will treat the proposition in a roundabout way, 
on the circuit of adaptation. To ascertain what true 
citizenship is, we must understand the sort of govern- 
ment to which it belongs. We are apt to regard the 
Eepublic as beginning with the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence; at which time the doctrine of human 
equality flashed across the century, and was caught 
by Jefferson's pen for the purpose of building a 
nation upon it. Well, now, the chrysanthemum on 
the lapel of your coat is just as much the origin of the 
plant, as the glittering theory of equal rights was the 
occasion of our Republic. Eo nation was ever 
founded on a theory. France tried it, and her Eepub- 
lic floated away on a sea of blood. England tried it, 
but the crown returned in the same generation. The 
little company that braved the Atlantic and built 
their homes in the wilderness, began this Eepublic. 
They brought with them certain forms of life, of 
conduct and worship, which were expressions of duty 
merely, and affected not only their personal aims, 
but their social relations. They were simple, true- 
hearted men and women, of flesh and blood, appetites 
and consciences, who established trade and organized 
towns on the models of their own simple, serious 
characters; idealizing nothing, but putting in form 
and fact their instincts of right and duty. Thus the 
Eepublic grew apace, generalizing individual charac- 
ter into common purpose, and developing forms of 
personal conduct into forces of government and law. 



Personal Force of the Teacher. 147 



There was none of the abstract in it all — no Gr< 
models, no luxuriating rhetoric — only simple, indus- 
trious, earnest, devoted lives. The unit of the ap- 
proaching Nation was manhood. You could not. if 
you tried, imagine the colonial builder of this Repub- 
lic as a whimsical, idealistic, atheistic, lazy, theoret- 
ical fellow, who went about setting up the divinity of 
isms as the condition of national existence. Defiance 
of royalty was a growth. It was an expression of 
character. If it had not been; if it had been simply 
an effusion of rhetoric, or the fulmination of a the- 
ory decked in gorgeous phraseology, the War of the 
Eevolution would not have lasted six months. But 
back of the challenge to the divinity of kings was 
over a century of development, wherein the people, 
gathering about the soil, the shop, the church, and 
the school, put into conduct and habit their sincere, 
lofty, and heroic ideas of life. 

As it took this sort of citizenship to create a na- 
tion, it will require just this kind to preserve it. If 
this Government is the expression of a form of con- 
duct, it can not live if character fails. Thus there is 
implied a model citizen. In Turkey or Persia it 
makes no difference, so far as the Government is con- 
cerned, what kind of a citizen any one is. But here 
it is different. When the average of citizenship falls 
below a certain level, down goes the Republic. But 
the true teacher aims at excellence, not at average; so 
his inquiry shall be, "What is the model citizen?" 
And having obtained a definite idea of one. which it 
is his duty to have, his next step is to teach the 
model, and therefore act it. 

And so the life and honor of the State rests on 



148 Keynotes of Education. 

the character of the teacher. As a citizen, I bow my 
head in profound respect to the teacher, when I make 
that remark. I stand in awe of the responsibility, 
when I consider the towering influence of association 
and the mysterious force of silence and negation. In 
times like these, when one is so apt to forget the 
virtue of simple, earnest manners and useful deeds, 
and lose one's self in the clamor and dust of social, 
industrial, and political life, it is absolutely neces- 
sary, and especially for schoolroom achievement, to 
entertain exact, clear-cut, positive convictions, ex- 
pressed not in words, but in forms of conduct. Habit 
is the strongest anchor. It has saved the old ship of 
state through many storms, when theories and creeds 
would have driven it on the rocks. Let us ever re- 
member, it was upon the meek, not meekness; upon 
the merciful, not mercy; upon the pure in heart, not 
purity — on which fell the benedictions of the Sermon 
on the Mount. 

Thus, friends, teachers, I have tried to portray 
those traits and potencies of the teacher which touch 
the child-life at every point, and direct it upward or 
downward, or on the dead level, as they themselves 
are bent. 



EXAMINATION OF TEACHERS. 

T^HE law very properly prescribes tests which they 
* must meet who would teach school. It is highly 
important that only they should teach who have the 
ability. Does the law's test meet this requirement? 

Knowledge and moral character do not make up 
the full equipment of a teacher. They are necessary, 
but are not sufficient. A person may hold an hon- 
estly-earned and highly-graded certificate, and yet be 
an incompetent teacher. A person may not be able 
to reach the required grades, and yet be a good 
teacher. 

It is to this necessary but undefined increment of 
the teachers' equipment that I desire to direct this 
discussion. The tests expressed in the statutes in- 
volve simple problems that may be solved by proper 
knowledge and a good, honest purpose. They require 
no treatment in this presence; but in another direc- 
tion we are confronted by a condition which must be 
met and disposed of. How far may an examiner pro- 
ceed beyond the prescribed text-book tests, into the 
region of temperament, disposition, aspiration, habit, 
tendency, environment of the applicant? Can he go 
there at all, and if so, by what route? This is the 
important question. 

We know that sympathy in a teacher is greater 
than an ability to parse; that enthusiasm is more im- 
portant than a knowledge of square root; that a pro- 
gressive spirit is better than a recollection of all the 

149 



150 Keynotes of Education. 

bays and capes in the corners of the earth. Is there 
a method by which the presence of these qualities in 
the applicant can be determined? The difficulty of 
this question must not relegate it to the junk-shop. 

I know there are wastes of sentimentality sur- 
rounding this inquiry; but I want nothing of it, ex- 
cept exact ideas. Knowledge does not make a teacher 
any more than a kit of tools makes a carpenter. 

It has happened that we have certain lines of in- 
struction along which exercise and development are 
carried. These lines are denominated geography, 
arithmetic, grammar, etc. They might have been 
something else, being the media and not the ends. 
They have been something else, will change again, are 
changing now. Great benefits are gathered along the 
way; but the end is power. So in applying tests to 
a teacher, a leading purpose is to find out whether 
he knows how, as well as what — that he radiates as 
well as absorbs. 

I plead for a wider exercise of discretion by the 
examiners — a discretion that says to an applicant, 
"Though you reach the text-book standard, you lack 
thoughtfulness, you lack energy, you lack ambition, 
you lack sympathy, you do n't read, you do n't asso- 
ciate with live people, you have no mission; in fact, 
you are negative as to many or most of those qualities 
of head and heart that impress, and rally, and lead, 
and develop children. Knowledge alone does not 
suffice; there must be wisdom, too; there must be that 
love of the teacher's duty which touches the child- 
nature — which inspires the youth to effort and 
pursuit. 



Examination of Teachers. 151 



Here are two young ladies applying for a certiii- 
eate. A school is awaiting the result of the examina- 
tion. One is stiff, angular, cross-looking, dowdy, 
snappish, suspicious, resentful; the other graceful, 
genial, neat, June roses in her cheeks, and their fra- 
grance in her heart. It requires 70 for a certificate. 
The first's grade is 75; the second's, 65. To which 
will you give that school? 

Again, looking from a different standpoint, our 
common schools are instituted to develop good citi- 
zenship. As the teacher, so is the school — so are the 
pupils. Therefore, he must be a good citizen, not a 
pedant, not a grammatical cinder, as Carlisle ex- 
presses it, hut an intelligent, useful, industrious, 
moral, high-minded man or woman — one who invests 
life with duties and who pursues lofty ideals and pur- 
poses. Such a one the examiners should try to place 
in the schoolroom. 

Now, this discretion must he wisely used, and, 
consequently, should he based on as wide range of in- 
formation as it is possible to obtain. We can i 
catechise upon these points as we can in school 
branches, and so the facts we want come to us ob- 
liquely, glancing from surrounding circumstances, 
which it should be our care to create. In other won I - . 
we must organize the discretion that must serve this 
matter. It must not be the sway of misty notions. 
Discretion should be to text-book tests what equit] 
to law. Unregulated discretion is unbounded des- 
potism, and defeats reform from the start. Hence, 
when the office of judgment is exalted, the considera- 
tions that rule should be understood and approved. 



152 Keynotes of Education. 

Then a broader examination will be a success. But to 
particularize : 

1. In the first place, we should make use of the 
examination itself to study the style, the disposition, 
the spirit, the general make-up of the teacher. There 
should be a few common-sense rules printed for the 
government of the examination. Note how the appli- 
cant observes them. Otherwise there should be rea- 
sonable latitude. How does he comport himself? 
Does he watch you, or does he want to get his back to 
you? Is he disorderly, slovenly, discourteous? How 
does he fold his manuscript? Is he snarly, suspicious, 
spiteful? Does he get himself into temptation, and 
look upon another's manuscript? In short, examina- 
tion-day should be made of good use in determining 
the personal characteristics of the applicant, and 
whether they are good or bad for the schoolroom. 
Strict or liberal grading may be resorted to, to give 
effect to the intelligence thus acquired; or, if one 
may be a little conscientious upon this point, merit 
or demerit marks may be used to affect the aggregate 
of grades. But I want to say here, that a little neat- 
ness, gentleness, sprightliness in a manuscript, even 
if it takes the wrong shoot on two or three questions, 
predicts better things for a class recitation than a 
full manuscript, scrawled and scrambled over by the 
lethargy of knowledge. 

2. Theory and Practice is the strategic point in an 
examination. It commands the field. Ten questions 
in this branch alone may constitute a thorough and 
telling test. It not only relates to the laws control- 
ling mental and moral development, and their appli- 



Examination of Teachers. 153 

cation to text-book instruction, but it reaches to the 
creation of sentiment and taste, and to the sources of 
courage and duty. Pedagogy is the science of man- 
hood, of womanhood. In its beautiful comprehension 
it asks you, not only what you know, but what you feel, 
what you dare. "We stop too soon in our psychology, 
and fail to reach those influences, suggestions, and 
forces that put value into life. I press this point, that 
if our examinations included this phase of psychology, 
with some emphasis, they would serve to discover, 
though not finally, whether the applicant had a re- 
gard or thought of those amenities and purposes that 
adorn a true life. Let us take a grand view of peda- 
gogy. Science is coming into our homes; commerce 
is arousing our sympathies; religion is reaching sun- 
nier summits; art is touching life with grace and 
beauty; but education is the sum of them all, and 
the teacher must get into harmony with these advanc- 
ing ideas. The catechism of yesterday needs revision. 
The pages of current literature are gleaming with live 
thoughts on the teacher's mission. They carry us 
forward, each with his own individual purpose and 
inspiration. To these heights of pedagogy must we 
ascend in our examinations, if we would make our 
work the worthiest; and so our questions must be 
arranged to embrace this broad scope, to see if the 
teacher is lagging or in the lead. 

3. Questions in general information should be 
added. These should relate to current events, gen- 
eral literature, simple science, and those lines of sub- 
stantial knowledge which ordinary folk ought to 
know. A teacher who knows nothing outside the 



154 Keynotes of Education. 

text-books is an ignoramus, and should not be toler- 
ated in the schoolroom. General knowledge gives 
breadth, resource, power. It enables a teacher to 
illustrate, awaken curiosity, furnish the spice of va- 
riety, and answer many questions that ought to be 
answered. A person who can't tell you a character 
in the "Merchant of Venice," the name of England's 
greatest statesman, or the size of the moon, and kin- 
dred facts, is qiute too narrow to explain intelligently 
an analysis in arithmetic or grammar. Wide views 
tend to make one reasonable and sympathetic; con- 
tracted views are apt to make one exacting and in- 
tolerant. Our screens should be so gauged as to 
catch the former and let the latter drop. 

4. There should be a premium on the progressive 
spirit. Continuous one-year certificates should be 
discouraged, if not abolished. At the same time there 
should be a constant stimulant furnished to enable 
the teacher to leave the ruts of text-book exercise, 
and to ascend to the higher planes of knowledge — alti- 
tudes that provide generous views of men and events, 
and flood the heart with the gladsome light of wide- 
stretching horizons. To accomplish this, exempt the 
teacher from re-examination in any common branch, 
when he has reached a high grade therein, provided 
he submits to an examination in a correlative higher 
branch? For instance, in my county (Lawrence), if 
a teacher has over 80 in a branch, he can, if he de- 
sire, continue that grade in his new certificate, pro- 
vided he takes an examination in the higher branch 
associated with the one in which his grade is carried 
forward. If he should have 85 in arithmetic, he may 



Examination of Teachers. 1 :. 5 



have that grade renewed if he submits to an examina- 
tion in mechanics. If, in the advanced examination. 
he gets below 50, he is given no credit in thai ad- 
vanced branch; if he gets over 50, that branch is 
added to the certificate to strengthen its character. 
In the process the teacher runs no risk. It is devised 
solely for his benefit and the school. If his grade is 
high in United States history, he may take general 
history as the correlative branch; for grammar we 
take rhetoric; for reading, literature; pedagogy, civil 
government; geography, simple science; physiology 
and hygiene, moral philosophy; penmanship, art. 
Now, this kind of an examination is not only educa- 
tional, but it soon reveals to the examiner who are 
the ambitious, progressive, wide-awake teachers of 
his bailiwick — something he should know, and know- 
ing, act accordingly. 

5. There should be a gradual elevation of the 
standard. The tests of to-day should be stronger than 
those of yesterday, because in the face of the accumu- 
lating demand for certificates, severer tests can be en- 
forced. That is reason enough. It so happens that 
the interests of education and the teacher himself 
are closely interwoven here. I have not time for t lie 
steps of the argument, but you see through it all — to 
the ergo, which is that low wages is a sign of educa- 
tional dry rot. It is one of the things that a Board 
of Examiners can largely control — that a fifty-dollar 
man may not be pushed aside by a twenty-five-dollar 
man, because a twenty-five-dollar man is not placed 
there to do the miserable work. This is one way of 
cleaning and purifying the murky stream, of which 



156 Keynotes of Education. 

Professor Gordy spoke yesterday, and will answer the 
purpose well, until his more scientific processes are 
fully elaborated. 

6. There should he at least one member on the 
Board of Examiners who is not a schoolteacher. 
There should be a link between the great, throbbing, 
bustling business world, and the system of instruction 
which prepares youth for practical affairs. The nearer 
we get our teaching to real life, the better. Book men 
are apt to become bookish. Education should not be 
permitted to incur the risks of pedantry. Beality 
and ideality blend in the higher criticism, but in 
common, every-day affairs, they are too lightly re- 
lated. You have probably seen the lover in the com- 
edy, courting his idol according to rules, which he 
slyly catches from a book in his hand. Well, no less 
awkward will you feel going into a bank with a 
school arithmetic as a guide. Not that the rules or 
principles are deficient, but because the problems 
are wholly different from what were expected. 
The profession of teaching is not to make teach- 
ers but citizens, and no affectation of learning 
will be able to solve the problems of the day which 
involve as much of willing and doing as of thinking 
and knowing; and which come to us, not down from 
cool, serene summits, but up from the dusty valleys 
where the crowds are. The hope of American life is 
in staying with it. Common-school education rests 
in the confidence of the taxpayer. 

But apart from these generalizations, there are 
some direct reasons why a Board of Examiners should 



Examination of Teachers. 1 5 7 

not be monopolized by teachers. I do not wond 
that teachers are a mutual admiration society. I fol- 
low the procession and do a great deal of shouti 
myself. But when this mutual admiration breaks up 
into county areas and municipal coteries, quite im- 
pervious to excellence from without: when it stifles 
the competition of worth and supplies the schools 
from a sort of system of inbreeding of teachers, it is 
time for reform. There is as much human nature in 
a teacher as in anybody else; and the lofty and exact- 
ing criticism that is expended on the able and aggres- 
sive teacher who proposes to cross over from the next 
county to be a candidate for one of the highest-prici 'I 
schools, contrasts astonishingly with, the generous and 
effusive treatment of that smart boy or girl just out 
of "our" school, whose certificate is to be a testimonial 
of "our" success and ability as a teacher. A well- 
informed, thoughtful citizen should be placed on the 
Board to watch this. Upon considerations of this na- 
ture a law has been passed prohibiting examiners 
teaching normal schools or classes to train teachers. 
It is a wise law, and its violation should not be toler- 
ated for a moment. A Board of Examiners must 
keep away from these complications, and be subject 
only to just and exalting influences. 

And now, after all has been said, after theorizing 
has been exhausted, we must admit thai an examina- 
tion of teachers at its best is not a perfect process. 
There is a feeling of insufficiency connected with it. 
But a Board of Examiners is not only a testing ma- 
chine, — it is a great educational iniluence; and if 



158 Keynotes of Education. 

made the most of, can do more public good than any 
other official organization in our Government. In his 
masterly address before the superintendents' section 
of the National Educational Association, at Philadel- 
phia, Mr. George William Curtis declared that the 
Board of Examiners is the basis of our common- 
school system, and that the first requisite of an ex- 
aminer is a sincere interest in the cause of education. 
It is with him to make the aim high or low; he fixes 
the character of the development. And so he must 
be a man of intelligence, of high character, of pure 
purpose, of tireless energy. It is with him to keep 
every teacher of the county on the strain towards 
something better and higher. He may prescribe a 
test; he can do something greater — he can set up a 
goal. He must be a man of advanced ideas. He must 
be up with the science, the invention, the achieve- 
ments of the day. He must be a reader of the North 
American Review, the Forum, the Atlantic, the Cen- 
tury, and similar publications, where the progress and 
genius of the times sparkle in gems of thought. He 
must look ahead rather than behind. No man living 
does so much to fix the standard of life as the school 
examiner. The preacher and editor fall behind in 
this. As is the examiner, so is the teacher. He ar- 
ranges the sweep of the trajectory, whether it reaches 
the stars or the mud. This educational influence sup- 
plements the weakness of the tests with responsibili- 
ties that can not be shifted. If pedantry, or charla- 
tanry, or shallowness, is the existing habit, it is for 
him to interpose the conditions in which these blights 



Examination of Teachers. L59 

can not thrive. Low bents and false notions must be 
met by an inspiration that leads one upon broader 
and higher paths, from which life is seen, full of 
duties and possibilities that invest the soul with a 
brighter and better purpose, which is the very essence 
of education. 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



mm 



oo 



9 811 00(LQ, 






lilf 



;; " : -;- - : - '■'-■• : ■••;■■< •'•'•-•; "■-■■'•■ 







SHE 






TS8IkL» 



si 






'*v 



^HH 






